Follow-up: Agendas of the meetings of the European Commission

In a recent article I reported about my "success" to find a list of Commission meeting agendas in the Commission's register, while complaining about the inability to find these via the Commission's main website.

In fact, I realised that there is a way to find them via the main page but it is still far from intuitive:

You go to the main page, where on the side menu you have to click on "Working for you". On the submenu you chose "Commission at work". On the page that opens, you have the centre column "Day-by-Day", where you need to click on "Weekly Commission meetings", which opens the next page.

Somewhere in the text on this page you find a link "agenda of the next Commission meeting" - and via this link, you finally end up at another list of Commission meeting agendas.

But it is even more confusing how I made my way to this list of agendas:

After I found the initial list via the register, I looked through the most recent agenda (17 June 2009). On page 4 under agenda item 8 there is "Memorandum from Mr TAJANI". This raised my interest and I searched for this phrase on Google.

The first entry on the results page is a cabinet newsletter from the Cabinet of Commissioner Antonio Tajani. In fact, I found that there is a whole list of cabinet newsletters, which are cruelly designed and relatively content empty.

The second entry on the results page is the agenda of the latest Commission meeting. But when I opened it, I realised that the link under which this document is saved is different to the register URL:

http://ec.europa.eu/atwork/collegemeetings/docs/ojcomm_en.pdf

So on the basis of this URL, I went back to the main page and was able to reconstruct the path I have described above.

This "improbable journey" shows how far away from transparent the Commission website is, and I hope somewhere in the Commission there are some persons who are able to re-design it as soon as possible!