In order to submit that ECI openPetition is looking for EU residents from seven different Member States to support the idea and volunteer for the required citizens’ committee.

At the moment, Jörg – the guy behind the site – has got support from Germany, Austria and Luxemburg leaving him four supporter short. If you wish to support the cause feel free to contact him directly at joerg@mitzlaff.net or read his blog on the matter.

The initiative proposal reads as follows:

Title:
Central public online collection platform for the European Citizen Initiative

Objectives:
Provide an online Europeean Initiatives Platform where you can register new initiatives and collect signatures at the same time. Show an overview of all initiatives which can be broken down by topic, country and polularity. Allow originators of an initiative to get in contact with their suppoerters and allow all citizens to discuss and argure each of the decisions. Show transparrently at which state each of the initatives are and who is in charge of the next step until the final deciscion on that topic has been made.

Reason:
Why should everyone put in the effort of hosting its one online collection tool when you can have a single one for all of us? Providing an open source collection software is great but only half the way. If we want to enable European Citizens to participate in the European politics then we have to provide a low barrier tool which works instantly and without technical expertise.

The political blogosphere in Europe is divided along national and linguistic lines. Although EU topics are frequently addressed by blogs across Europe, it is cumbersome to get an overview of the EU focused blogosphere – one of the main problems that prevents a pan- European blog debate on EU issues. However, the EU focused blogosphere is growing and becoming more important. The Internet can be the place where a European public sphere and ultimately a European demos could be developed.

Andreas – Feb 2, 2009

Andreas wrote these lines just one week after a small group of eurogeeks launched the first and still only blog aggregator for EU-focused blogs bloggingportal.eu. That launch was exactly three years ago and marks today bloggingportal’s birthday: Have a happy one!

I wasn’t even in the group at that time. I only joined the team in July of that year. Since then I’ve met wonderful people, many of them in real life in Brussels or Berlin, and we’ve had crazy discussions about mad EU stuff during that time. Geekery on so many levels!

But in the end we had one simple yet challenging goal with bloggingportal: connecting European blogosphere & fostering a pan-European public sphere. Did we succeed? The fact that Andreas’ quote remains so valid even today would indicate otherwise. Twitter certainly connected many euro-think-alikes and eurogeeks. Certainly, we as avid social media users and EU nerds have contributed to building yet another Brussels bubble. But has the bloggingportal as a website played any significant role in the recent EU online years? Many might doubt, read Mathew’s thoughts about our performance for instance.

Sure, we had active times, we had prolonged summer breaks and early winter sleeps, but in the end the daily business of reading the many posts and selecting the most interesting ones always went on by a small number of editors. Here’s a small indication what we’ve kept ourselves busy with since the beginning:

• A little over 200,000 individual blog posts went through the portal since 2009. (That makes for a lot of blogging if you ask me.)
• In total we used 747,329 tags to categorize these posts.
• 5,239 individual blog posts were selected to be displayed on the homepage and more recently in our facebook/twitter feeds, the weekly and daily newsletter, as well as our weekly summary “the week in bloggingportal”.

Even if that makes almost 5 per day it also means that we have selected not even three percent of all posts. Yet, all of these have been read, checked and found interesting (in some way) by us, the editors. Bloggingportal.eu is 100% hand made from code to content. Admittedly, most of the work is done by only few of us. The following graphic shall give you an insight into who is behind selecting the many blog posts most of the time. It shows the total amount of promoted posts by editors in the recent 1,095 days. (By the way thanks Ralf!)

That being sad said .. if you’re interested in the project and want to help us to shape the future of both bloggingportal and euroblogging get in touch with us. It’s great fun and I wouldn’t want to miss it. Start by hearing from other editors and euroblog enthusiasts.

As you see this list is a lot longer and consists in total of 55 blogs. Not so bad, isn’t it? So, get your German phrasebook out of the basement,  hit Google translate or simply try it on your own .. and say hi to:

The German speaking Euroblogosphere:

• … Kaffee bei mir?
• /e-politik.de/blog -Europa
• Andreas Schieder
• Außenwirtschaftslupe
• Blog von Andreas Grieß
• blog.eu.info.at
• citizenseurope
• Dailytalk.ch – Schweizer Politikblog
• Der (europäische) Föderalist
• Der Blogger von Arte
• Die Euros
• Dr Herbert Dorfmann
• e-comm
• Estland
• EU-Journalist
• Euro-Police
• Euromarches (DE)
• Europa – EU – Europäische Union
• europa bewegen
• europaeum
• Federal Europe and beyond…
• Franziska Brantner (MEP)
• Gerhard Mangott
• Helga Trübel (MEP)
• Inclusion means NOExclusion
• Jan Albrecht
• Jan’s EU-Blog
• Kantoos Economics
• Karin Resetarits
• Karpfenteich
• Kartellblog
• kielspratineurope
• Klima der Gerechtigkeit (EU)
• Lettland
• Litauen
• Lost in EUrope
• Martin Ehrenhauser (MEP)
• Matthias Groote (MEP)
• Mayers Europa-Blog (Der Standard)
• move – Wissen, wie Europa tickt
• Netzpolitik
• NoPNR
• Peter Pilz
• Post aus Brüssel (MEP Franziska Brantner)
• RandomInsights (AT)
• Rebentisch Sköne Oke
• Reinhard Bütikofer
• Silke Gebel
• State under Construction
• think europe – European youth education
• Treffpunkt Europa
• vasistas?
• Verfassungsblog
• wortwallungen
• Zur Politik

• Café Babel is a project that you most likely know already. It’s got a German version, too.
• citizeneurope observes closely (and comments on) European issues from a national perspective.
• Der (europäische) Föderalist (“the European Federalist”) believes that democracy doesn’t stop at national borders.
• e-comm is an Austrian blog that covers the European TelComms Policy.
• Europa-BlogJ is a blog that I’ve just found through Google. It has only written in August of this year, but I’ll keep an eye on it.
• Europolice is critically monitoring the European police.
• Karpfenteich (or “Carp pond”) is run by a Berlin based media analyst. It doesn’t really have an intentional focus I guess. Lately Karpenteich covered the eurofinances.
• Kartellblog (or “antitrust  blog”) is covering current developments in antitrust law. In thas it covers developments on the EU level as well. (Fun fact: In the about section of the blog the author actually apologises to his readers that he’s got to mention EU law from time to time.) — Update Dec 3, 2011: As Andreas pointed out in the comments I might have gotten the wrong impression here. He has meant general EU law instead of specific antitrust EU law.
• Lettland (Latvia), Litauen (Lithuania) and Estland (Estonia) are all three very similiar blogs giving an insight into these three member states.
• Lobbycontrol is watching lobbyists in Berlin and Brussels.
• Lost in Europe is written by a Brussels based freelance journalist and offers commentary on current EU politics.
• Nachbar (or “neighbour) is focussing on EU Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy. the author is writing for the German version of Euractiv.
• Netzpolitik is probably the most read blog in the German speaking world. It’s a blog you cannot avoid if you want to keep up with all things digital in German politics. As such it’s kind of the megaphone for the German digital activism for the freedom of the internet, net neutrality and what not. From time to time its authors feature EU issues if they’re of relevance to Germany.
• Mayers Europablog is the blog of Austrian EU journalist Thomas Mayer who writes for the Austrian daily “Der Standard”.
• Treffpunkt Europa (or “Meeting point Europe”) is collective blog effort by members of the German chapter of the Young European Federalists, a youth initiative that’s advocating for a united Europe. This blog is the  German language version of thenewfederalist.eu (EN), taurillon.org (FR) and eurobull.it (IT). Similar is the blog of its regional chapter in Schleswig Holstein (Europa Bewegen).
• Vasistas? (do read the anecdote of its meaning!) is bilingually linking the French and the German blogospheres. It is focussing on the digital rights and freedoms of citizens and brought much attention (also via Netzpolitik) of the neighbour’s digital policy missteps such as the German data retention or website blocking efforts and the French Hadopi law.
• Verfassungsblog (Constitutional blawg) keeps you up to date on matters of Constitutional Policy in German, Europe and elsewhere.
• Wortwallungen (Its translation would mean something powerful in words starting to move, I guess. Probably something like “words aboiling”.) is also an Austrian euroblog. It covers a whole variety of EU policy news.
• Who am I missing here?

—

Obviously I have to talk about methodology here and how, or better yet why, I selected these blogs. For apparent reasons I only mentioned blogs that have published a post in the last six months or so. (Applying this criteria pretty much narrows the whole thing down to the aforementioned blogs.) There is a great chance that one of the missing blogs would post another story in the near future but as of today I would count this blog as inactive (like mine most of the year, but that’s another story). Just to name a few, these German language blogs (that I know of) stopped publishing in the course of 2010 or 2011: E-Blogs, Europa-Digital, Europa-Transparent, Gärtner, planet in progress, Politikbeobachter, German version of Toute l’Europe.

Moreover, I have not included blogs by Members of the German parliaments (federal or regional) or the European Parliament although I certainly should have. But to be honest I don’t really read them on a regular basis. I follow the simply rule: If the news is relevant to me, it will reach me. I’m also missing company blogs on EU regulation in the fields that concern them. If you know of those blogs, please do also share them.

Also, I chose to present blogs that don’t necessarily have their main focus on EU issues but from time to time include a European perspective in their blogging. It’s more “European” than simply blogging on institutional or communication stuff all day (which I do here on europaeum) if you ask me. Finally I’ve added Austrian blogs if they publish in German to balance the whole Germany theme here. Also the list would be way more depressing if I left these out.

—

Updated 1 December, 2011: Find a more accurate list as extracted from the bloggingportal here.

—

Credits, or more concretely apologies, for the image go out to malthes on flickr. the image is published under cc (by-nc-sa).

Also, an honest thanks to Reuters for allowing private and non-commercial video embeds.

“Legyen béke, szabadság és egyetértés“, ezt kíván az egész Europa is.

Now former chancellor Helmut Schmidt joined the choir. In a recent TV documentary about former German finance minister Per Steinbrück and the finance crisis he takes on the leadership and the recent EU enlargement. He is being quoted by euractiv:

There is no leader at the moment. It is a worse situation than we have ever experienced in the 60 years of European integration. [...]

In the Maastricht conference, we were twelve member states. We’ve then become 15 and then 20 and 26 and 27. This is all nonsense. [...]

It was right to give them psychological support. For that a NATO membership would have been sufficient, it would have satisfied even the Americans. But to have them join the European Union, without us having adjusted the rules of that giant club accordingly, that was a catastrophic mistake.

(euractiv.de/own translation, 02 August 2010)

I support the people that care about the future of Europe as a common project. They raise their voice to stimulate a debate and they’re being heard by an intellectual elite, sometimes even politics. Many of these accusations are far too comprehensible. I share much of their criticism. But I cannot take these grumpy old white men serious any longer. Sure, they’ve been there, they’ve done it all. I mean, they basically created the European Union and all that goes with it. But as long as I have the image of Statler and Waldorf in my head, every time they bring up new critique and bash current politics without being anything close to constructive I’m not willing to accept it, even if I share their opinions. (Imagine they blogged. I’m not sure they would comments.)

Update (August 3, 2010):

While I was writing this post Jon Worth thought about Schmidt, too, and why he’s right.

I welcome the European Commission reaching out to the many experts and interested to collect their views on the matter. It does so usually by opening a public consultation process in the form of a green paper allowing everyone to comment on the Commission thoughts and answer some of the questions that the Commission itself will have to answer in a later process, ideally with a concrete proposal. If the Commission really cares about citizens’ involvement it even provides serveral translations of that paper. Not so much recently, unfortunately.

“This questionnaire is intended to contribute to the debate on the open internet and net neutrality in Europe and to feed into the report which the Commission aims to present to the European Parliament and Council before the end of the year in accordance with its Declaration (in Annex I) made in the context of the adoption by the European Parliament and Council of the telecoms reform package in November of last year.”

Point 1 of the Questionnaire for the public consultation on the open internet and net neutrality in Europe (PDF)

Interestingly enough the answer shall “feed” into the Commission’s report. I like that term. At least here in the internet it suggests that information is made accessible very easily, using the latest technology. But what I still do not get is why the green paper is  just a simple PDF file. Admittedly, I understand that this topic can become very fast very complex. Still, why isn’t the Commission making use of current technology.

Many students have to collect answers for projects and papers. Every week I obtain another invitation to contribute to a survey. Almost everytime it links to a webpage where I can answer online and simply submit it to the person. Sometimes these questionnaires include further information, hyperlinks and background information making it easier for me to answer as wished. That’s the stuff the internet can do. Moreover it’s highly convenient for those asking the questions to collect that many answers. If they use of the many online services, they can export the questions bundled to topics, get graphical results and many other helpful tools to better understand what people submitted. Setting up such a service takes only few minutes. Perhaps a bit more if you programme and host it yourself but still it’s not huge work. I can do it, so why can’t the European commission. I cannot think of legal implications the prevent it to do so. Mostly you don’t even have to tell so much about yourself apart from maybe name, organisation (if any) and e-mail address.

I’ll be answering the questions anyway. I will write them down in my OpenOffice document, will create a PDF file, will send it by e-mail. I wonder what happens in Brussels, when they receive the e-mail, print the document, try to aggregate my answers and those of the others and do what ever they do.

By the way, these are the 15 questions raised by the European Commission. English only. But you don’t have to answer every single question. Every contribution counts to help make the European internet open and neutral. You can do so by September, 30th.

1. Is there currently a problem of net neutrality and the openness of the internet in Europe?  If so, illustrate with concrete examples. Where are the bottlenecks, if any? Is the problem such that it cannot be solved by the existing degree of competition in fixed and mobile access markets?
2. How might problems arise in future? Could these emerge in other parts of the internet value chain? What would the causes be?
3. Is the regulatory framework capable of dealing with the issues identified, including in relation to monitoring/assessment and subsequent enforcement?
4. To what extent is traffic management necessary from an operators’ point of view? How is it carried out in practice? What technologies are used to carry out such traffic management?
5. To what extent will net neutrality concerns be allayed by the provision of transparent information to end users, which distinguishes between managed services on the one hand and services offering access to the public internet on a ‘best efforts’ basis, on the other?
6. Should the principles governing traffic management be the same for fixed and mobile networks?
7. What other forms of prioritisation are taking place? Do content and application providers also try to prioritise their services? If so, how – and how does this prioritisation affect other players in the value chain?
8. In the case of managed services, should the same quality of service conditions and parameters be available to all content/application/online service providers which are in the same situation? May exclusive agreements between network operators and content/application/online service providers create problems for achieving that objective?
9. If the objective referred to in Question 8 is retained, are additional measures needed to achieve it? If so, should such measures have a voluntary nature (such as, for example, an industry code of conduct) or a regulatory one?
10. Are the commercial arrangements that currently govern the provision of access to the internet adequate, in order to ensure that the internet remains open and that infrastructure investment is maintained? If not, how should they change?
11. What instances could trigger intervention by national regulatory authorities in setting minimum quality of service requirements on an undertaking or undertakings providing public communications services?
12. How should quality of service requirements be determined, and how could they be monitored?
13. In the case where NRAs find it necessary to intervene to impose minimum quality of service requirements, what form should they take, and to what extent should there be co-operation between NRAs to arrive at a common approach?
14. What should transparency for consumers consist of? Should the standards currently applied be further improved?
15. Besides the traffic management issues discussed above, are there any other concerns affecting freedom of expression, media pluralism and cultural diversity on the internet? If so, what further measures would be needed to safeguard those values?