Over on the Belgian IABC’s thriving ‘web2eu’ site, Philip Weiss embedded a TED video of Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, discussing the revolutionary impact of social media (more references on the be-IABC site). It’s really so good I thought I’d repost it here and add some observations (it takes some time to load):

Constructive discussions generally require good discussion documents. One of the Commission’s major contributions to any European online space should therefore be a EUROPA that supports the conversations – setting out What it (and the EU) does, Why and How it does it to the ‘interested public’, in their language. A pilot project explored one way [...]

Following Finnegan’s Take on Mr Barroso’s statement, here is a visual view of his top 100 words:

Trans-European online Communities of Practice should become a key element in the European online community, but examples so far are few. This post looks at DG INFSO, which has been using online community principles since 2002, two years before the phrase “Web 2.0″ was invented.

Now and then the question arises: how can we get a transnational discourse on European topics underway, or create a European online public space? The two phrases in bold, above, both come from one of the latest posts on the topic, this time from Julien Frisch. They follow initiatives like Steffan’s Bloggingportal.eu, which aggregates Euroblog [...]

It’s been a long break from blogging. A month’s holiday offline in Australia had something to do with it, but mainly it’s been a summer of thinking about applying online community management to EU policies and programmes; catching up on three months’ worth of For Immediate Release podcasts on my new phone; and exploring and [...]

An analysis of participation rates in the Obama Administration’s Open Government initiative provide a refreshing reality check for us in Europe. One would think, based on some of my posts, that I was a starry-eyed idealist when it comes to the potential of online communications to improve understanding and participation in the EU by Europeans. [...]

Quite a few people look at me in quite a puzzled way when I mention how the techniques and approaches of online community management ‘may have something to offer’ the EU in terms of communications, but that this may require ‘a change in mentality’. When they look like that, I say “You know, something along [...]

I’ve posted before on the importance of the semantic web to EU policies and programmes. Here’s a quite well-executed video about the EU’s cluster of projects in the area of Future Internet, which encompasses semantic research, a pervasive internet of things, etc. It’s not on YouTube so, like the video of Tim Berners-Lee I posted [...]

Following rapid and significant expansion into new markets and sectors of governance and policy, innovative union of nation states (“European Union”, or EU) seeks an experienced: Online Community Manager to gain buy-in at all levels throughout our 27 Members, as well as with external stakeholders on a global level. Principal Duties You will be responsible [...]