Commission consultation: EU agriculture post 2013

Do you know how the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU should look after 2013?

If yes, just follow the invitation* of the European Commission, join the debate, and read what others have answered on the questions posed by the Commission.

If you need some more facts on how the billions of euros (almost 50% of the EU budget) for the CAP are wasted invested, why not reading Jack Thurston's "Does the CAP fit?" on FollowTheMoney.eu or why not going to Farmsubsidy.org to search how CAP money is spent in your country (see sidebar) or your city (search field)?**

But apart from that:

Does anybody believe in the possibility that the CAP is ever reformable? I suppose that not even Commissioner Cioloş is... Or are you, Sir?

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*Via Wyn Grant
** Thanks at Jack for a great presentation on farmsubsidy.org at the re:publica 10 conference!

Picture: @amypalko / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

re:publica 10 is over

Wow, I could starting to write a book or organise the coming years around the ideas gathered during the three days of the re:publica 10 conference.

It'll need some days until I'm at the point where all these ideas are ordered: Data protection and data creation, data planting and data harvesting, organising campaigns and analysing them, hyperlocal and pan-European, online and offline, down-to-earth and extremely technical, crisis and normality, culture and anti-culture, young and old, freedom and control.

Trust me, many of those younger and older people who have gathered here in Berlin for the last three days pretty much know what they are doing. And while many are just doing old things in new ways, many more are thinking about new things in new ways.

My fear is that those holding crucial political, social or economic positions in our local, regional, national, European, international societies have no clue about many of the possibilities and dangers, about the technical opportunities and social needs behind many of the things we have discussed here.

But we don't care and we will do these things anyway, and we will win and fail as generations have won and failed before us.

PS: Most importantly thanks for the organisers and the many people I could meet, talk to and discuss with - hope to see you again very soon!

The Leaking Union

The "dark hole of Brussels" with its "obscure institutions" and its "opaque political processes" has become a powerful if not the main image to characterise the political system of the European Union.

A lot of what is going on in the political capital of our Union remains unnoticed by a wider public, not just because old and new media do not show enough interest but also because a lot of the relevant political interaction and documentation is confidential or not easily accessible if you are not located in Brussels.

Leaks to the outside world are seldom and the institutions work to prevent them:

"The Secretariat is examining ways of marking the electronic version of all official documents automatically sent to each delegation to allow identification of the source of any leaks." (EU Council 2006)

During the presentation of Wikileaks by spokesperson Daniel Schmidt at the re:publica 10 social media conference in Berlin yesterday I was asking myself whether we might soon see a change.

I knew Wikileaks before they published the now globally watched video shot from an Apache helicopter in Iraq, but I didn't really care about Wikileaks because I wasn't aware of the size and the complex mechanisms that the platform has established to secure the leaking of thousands of documents from Kenya over Iceland to the USA.

I realised that I had never considered searching for EU documents that had been leaked to the platform, and I suppose many EU journalists haven't either.

Right now, the Wikileaks archives are offline, but as soon as they are back on track, European bloggers and journalists should start searching for the hidden treasures we haven't seen yet. I suppose we will be able to find one or another scoop, and if not it won't take long until those in or around the EU institutions who have access to important documents will start leaking them.

The advantage of the complexity of the European Union is that it is not just one large black hole but that it has so many possible access points that it offers so many little holes, so many brilliant opportunities for leaks. And there are so many diverse interests that one or another side will be willing to make certain developments public.

So far, the possibilities for those holes to be tapped were limited, but Wikileaks and other comparable platforms will allow to build the tubes that transport the leaked content to those who try to uncover the hidden, to show what is discussed and decided in our names behind closed doors, paid by our taxes and legitimated by our votes.

I am looking forward to the day when Wikileaks goes back online to see whether the Leaking Union is already a reality or whether it will become one very soon.

(updated with the citation in the 3rd paragraph on 20 April 2010)

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilianov/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The European Citizens' Initiative and our re:publica 10 workshop

The European Commission has brutally failed, judging from some blank faces in our workshop on the European Citizens' Initiative at the re:publica 10 this morning.

Those European citizens present at the session - approximately 50 to 60 people - were to a large extend not aware of the current proposal of the European Commission for an initiative that is meant to be for European citizens. It needed four eurobloggers - eurosocialiste, Martin, Jon and me - to present the issue and to create stunned faces over the stupidness of the proposed rules (see Mathew's summary of euroblog reactions so far).

The lack of knowledge of the proposal shows that, until today, Commissioner Šefčovič has been unable to communicate the Commission proposal to a wider European public, and he probably knows why:

Because he has put forward a text that wants to restrict European citizens from running bottom-up campaigns; he put forward a proposal that doesn't trust citizens and that surrenders to technology-averse populist fears of "bad things that could come out of Twitter" (that is what the Commissioner said in the press conference where he presented the issue).

Bye the way, Mr Šefčovič: In one of those "stupid" "silly" Twitter/Facebook things you are afraid of we managed the collective translation of an ECI-length text in 33 languages within one week, including all EU languages and some minority languages such as Sorbian or Cornish.

So during the re:publica 10 workshop, we eurobloggers on the panel were very sure that the ECI as proposed by the Commission so far is undoable for ordinary citizens, it is way too restrictive and it doesn't take into account the great possibilities that modern communication offers. It is a European Initiative for Large Organisations, those who already have access to the EU institutions thanks to their money and the human resources.

It puts undue burdens on citizen organisers of an ECI, e.g. by demanding to register their online collection system in each of the EU member states, a bureaucratic procedure that will very likely lead to different results in every second member states, even after the Commission has proposed harmonised rules. Not to speak about the need to register ID card numbers when signing the petition. It also does not allow the collection of signatures from French EU citizens in the streets of Berlin or from Portuguese citizens on the beach of Varna (Bulgaria).

It is meant to be impossible, and it is so on purpose - you can see that because the Commission just plans to employ two stuff members for all ECIs that might come up.

And no one in the audience disagreed with our rather critical assessment of the ECI proposal; those talking were pretty sure that you couldn't run an ECI without the support of strong transnational organisations.

Several didn't even see a point in doing an ECI as it is presented right now, and we encouraged them to heavily lobby the European Parliament and the governments in the EU Council to get a final proposal that is not afraid of citizens but takes them seriously.

Dear MEPs, dear governments: Show that you have more respect for us citizens and more understanding for the usefulness of modern technology for democratic processes than the EU Commission, in particular Commissioner Šefčovič who showed his disrespect during his presentation three weeks ago!

re:publica 10

I am heading towards Berlin to attend the re:publica 10 (#rp10) social media conference starting tomorrow .

As you may have noticed, the conference has kind of started already for me and my fellow Bloggingportal.eu editors with our collective translation experiment last week.

The little experiment was part of the preparations for a workshop eurosocialiste, Jon, Martin and I are organising under the modest title "How to reach one million Europeans" (which is a reference to the European Citizens' Initiative) at the conference on Thursday.

Today, I'll still have to do some organisational stuff in Berlin - my old home - and then tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock the conference will kick off. The organisers say that we will be 2,500 people which sounds pretty big. So hopefully I will find the time to write one or another blog post, sending live impressions from this crowd of "social mediatics".

I also hope to meet some of you who I just know virtually so far or who are interested in the eurosphere - so just comment on this post, send me an email or contact me on Twitter if you'd like to meet, even if it's at the sidelines of the conference in case you're not attending.

PS: You can also talk to me directly when you see me on the conference venue: I am young, male, white, and I use a laptop.