The post you referred to is the first one I reference in the above post (Not losing sight of the basics), whereas the comment you mention was to Ron’s highly entertaining post on the hoops an EU expert and Transparency expert has to go through to find documents on the Council site.

My previous post was just a plea to not forget EUROPA entirely, as the EU has pretty much fixed resources for comms, so work in one area takes away from work done elsewhere. As I pointed out “the EU institutions have a thousand reasons for getting social media right … but getting these basics right is important, too”, particularly given the fact that a good EUROPA is essential for any genuinely useful social media engagement strategy, particularly socmed outreach, where the potential is enormous.

As for EUROPA search … don’t get me started! Particularly as I’m not peddling proprietary search (my focus is generally open source anyway).
But my comment to Ron’s post was less about document searchability and more about linking relevant documents together to make document research more efficient.

PS The previous post also covers this topic: “If EUROPA was only serving hyper-specialists in EU affairs, all it’d really need to do would be to publish documents with decent metadata and invite people to use Google. I’m exaggerating to make my point, which is that any website is a lot more than a document repository…”

Perhaps some of your worries seem to be a bit early. Even if the Euroblogosphere is growing, no exponential growth in interaction demand seems to be on the cards for the vast majority of 501 million EU citizens.

On the other hand, it is axcellent that at least a few trailbazers within the institutions break out of the old mold.

If I remember correctly you spoke about the allocation of communication resources a way back: social media vs. doing the basics better.

Just a while ago you commented on the Council search function and that of the institutions.

Here my own experience is that with advanced search you can often find what you want on the Council website, even if it requires some work (and if the document is accessible, a big if).

In comparison the general or quick search functions on the Commission (Europa) and European Parliament website are 1) lotteries, and 2) usually inferior to Google.

Why have a proprietary search option if the value added is negative?

Social and basic media improvements are hardly mutually exclusive, I would think.

Both are clearly needed.

My original point was that it is easy … at its current scale: a tiny Brussels Bubble. But what happens if the EU’s experiments in social media actually fulfill their promise and the bubble grows beyond Brussels?

Answer: the quantity of people reacting (intelligently) grows with it. But the number of officials responding just doesn’t scale. The model becomes a victim of its own success.

Limiting interactivity mainly to the Bubble and ‘brokers’ is possibly a way around this. But it does bring us to similar, difficult questions regarding the accreditation of bloggers to EU Institutions, which took a step forward this week, without answering the question of exactly what criteria should be used.

The beauty of web 2.0 is that there is no requirement to maintain a presence on a pre-ordained schedule as opposed to getting out a regular newsletter: you have something to say, you say it, someone reacts (intelligently), you respond. If the information gets passed on, great. If someone is sufficiently interested to translate it into a local context (and perhaps also linguistically), even better.

The institutions feel there is an imperative to communicate in an even-handed and systemic fashion. I think web 2.0 should allow them (and their contractors) to question this mindset and look for more ad-hoc approaches.

The process you describe – where you, a Bubble denizen, connect the EU to a national audience through a personal relationship created via social media – is exactly what I was talking about in a number of posts about Building Bridges between EU and national conversations (cf, specific fields of interest, communities of interest/practice, etc.).

The resulting network shape is exactly as you describe.

[Aside: If anyone wants to know more about the implications of this, I cannot recommend Greg Satell's blog on network theory strongly enough. Start with his 2009 post on The Primal Forces that Drive Social Networks. He's @Digitaltonto on Twitter]

However, I’d not made the connection between this network shape and the scaling problem addressed above. Ironic, really, but it goes to show the importance of blogging one’s thoughts – together we’re more than twice as creative than the two of us are individually.

This redoubles my conviction that we need to find ways to motivate people to become that ‘trusted bridge’. Actually, I prefer your term of ‘trusted broker’: after all, this is not just a passive carrier pigeon role, but an interpreter and translator between different spheres and contexts.

Some ideas on that under ‘Motivations’ in Specialists required to build bridges, while I think part of the answer to your final question are the Community of Practice/Interest sites which the Commission should be convening, described in (When) Does EU blogging matter?, easily findable online through both social networks and SEO.

Good example:

Take the bloggers from the more eurosphere-focused blog Vasistas. I knew them digitally for quite some time already (but had never met them in person) and so I’ve invited them to join the bloggers meeting with the Hungarian Presidency. Kirsten had time to come to the third meeting, and she wrote a blog post on Vasistas that she also cross-posted on Netzpolitik.org, the most important German blog with ~1 million visits each month.

She, by interacting in the bubble, helped to transmit the actual content of our discussions to a wider German audience outside of the bubble.

The question now is whether, because of that, suddenly thousands of German readers wanted to interact with EU Council Presidency officials, which would be a scaling up due to rising demand following the knowledge that the institutions are in fact open for such kind of interaction.

I doubt that.

The fact that a trusted source (trusted in the sense of the national audience in this case) has done the interaction and helped to transmit the relevant message as a multiplier or broker will in most cases be enough. Being a multiplier or broker takes up a lot of time that most people are not able or ready to invest. So they rely on multipliers and brokers, and we just have to think harder how to get more multipliers from and to all European public spheres.

In the end, network analysis has shown that most natural networks evolve in that way: Most people come together in rather close subnetworks (groups, cliques etc.) that are usually linked just by a few bridges.

In the end, the demand for EU officials to answer to the requests of thousands of citizens through social media will remain rare. Most request will always come from the bubble. But that is kind of natural: As seldom as I will interact with officials of the German government or administration, as seldom will my German friends interact with the EU administration. So by being present in social media I’m not suddenly confronting every official with presence; it is still limited to those who matter.

The final question thus is:

How do I create points of access for the (rare) cases that I actually have a question to ask to people from a community that I usually don’t interact with, people whose specific language I don’t use in my daily life? Those people at such points of access should be ready to understand my request and to react in a way that reflects my reality.

A good website may help because I may know in general where to search, so I’d find my way to the website (directly or through a search engine) and when it is good, it guides me directly to the answer or to someone to whom I can ask my question. This may then lead back to social media, helping me to find those people who are out there to interact with the public or guiding me to the right documents or the expert(s) not present in social media who might be able to help me through an email or a classic letter.

There won’t the one way through which people address EU institutions, and so they have to have as good websites as they have to have a good strategy of how to be present on social media.

It’s so simple when you write it down in a comment!

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.