AI is increasingly being used to support public participation in policy. While they offer a lot, they could invisibly skew policy if used carelessly.- 3rd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy 

Did participants in the ‘Future of Europe’ process influence President Juncker’s State of the European Union speech, as promised? Of course not. Rightly.- 2nd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy

it won’t be the thousands of citizens’ dialogues orchestrated by the EU Commission across Europe over the summer that will re-engage EU citizens with Europe... There are an estimated 30,000 corporate lobbyists operating in Brussels, dominating the EU policy process. While NGOs have increasingly been included in EU policymaking... under-staffed ..…

how do we put the genie back in its bottle? Here are three approaches... If the first model leaves it to the legislator and ultimately the courts to decide what constitutes fake news, the second outsources responsibility to social media.... Instead of killing the story, you surround that story with related articles so as to provide more context a…

6th Scenario – More EuropeanismDemocracy needs an identity foundation that binds individuals into the demos... Europe does not have that. The proof?... There are no successful pro-European populists!The local and particular cannot be based on the general and universal.... There has to be something more ...

EUrope’s success in eliminating mobile roaming charges may be the first “data4policy” case study where the data was website traffic, and illustrates the rewards of allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of large organisations.

With a few paragraphs buried in... bureaucrat-speak, the GDPR also restricts what the EU calls “automated individual decision-making.” ... what neural networks do... prohibit any automated decision that “significantly affects” EU citizens... provides ... a “right to explanation.” ... the option of reviewing how a particular service made a partic…

EU money flows from Brussels into thousands of projects and ideas. Why does nobody notice?... some of the worst storytellers happen to be located in Brussels ... majorities in society and the media believe that the European Union belongs in the dustbin of history... eternal Brussels congresses where elitist Eurocrats engage in nothing but myopic …

The festering European economic crisis was joined by two additional crises in 2015 – the refugee crisis and the security crisis that public terrorist attacks generated. All of this was played out in mass media and provided the final push for nationalist parties across Europe ... In contrast to Trump, European populists are committed conservative…

Tech companies may face new legislation after struggling to comply with voluntary code of conduct... Under a code of conduct announced in May, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft agreed to review and respond to “the majority” of hate speech complaints within 24 hours

Quick response to Baekdael’s Are you under estimating prototyping?, over on Medium: "Your excellent post reminds me of a participation project a few years ago for a government organisation. Ostensibly, it was going to ‘open up’ EU decisionmaking to the public ..."

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

There will never be an ‘EU superstate’ as long as the national presses of 28 countries are presenting 28 different visions of the European dream... there is no real union if members can’t watch together, read together, instinctively think and bind together. No news means no common purpose... A continent of many languages has no means of building b…

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

Plebiscite-pushers have got Europe's voters hooked on the cheap rush of direct democracy

The loss of state control, the fragility of EU institutions, and the rise of populism could bring about a disintegration process in Schengen, the eurozone or "even the Single Market", according to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2016.

The future of the EU is interesting, because it cannot make any significant decisions now, and it cannot decide to dissolve. What will happen is what is happening now: less and less does Europe make decisions, and when it does, European states pay less and less attention to them... Buildings in Brussels continue to issue edicts, and everybody else…

from a locked-down Brussels to a grieving Paris to a refugee camp in Greece, Henry Porter reports on the European Union’s existential crisis.

it is close to impossible to report well on the European Union. The bureaucratic monster only makes great news when it fails, and even then either you, your editor, or your audience will misunderstand the reasons why.

When EU tried to create its own platforms directly, “it was spectacularly bad. It tried to create its own version of Google, called Quaero... Going head-to-head with Google with a project involving well-funded, energetic entrepreneurs would be foolish. Attempting the same with a multigovernment collaboration is beyond description.”... there a…

The Politico founders certainly can’t be accused of lacking in hubris. But they have the track record to back much of that up: Since they left the Washington Post in 2007 to join the new company, which was backed by broadcasting executive Robert Allbritton, Politico has become a significant force on the national media landscape. - Politico want…

despite improvements in the number of female MEPs, there is still a chronic lack of women in key decision-making positions, particularly in the Commission and the Council. - EUROPP – The lack of gender equality in EU decision-making means EU citizens are still suffering from a ‘double democratic deficit’

"Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark and Norway are the world's happiest countries, according to the 2015 World Happiness Report, ... Bringing countries together in a big bloc such as the EU doesn't help increase social capital. And when some countries in such a union do worse than others, their social fabric rips in a dramatic way, trust erodes and th…

"The much fussed-over crisis in media isn’t the crisis of journalism. "Printing yesterday’s news on paper and slapping an ad on it — that’s a 19th-century formula, and in 2015 there are reporters and executives who are surprised the model isn’t working. The nostalgia for a past that was a very comfortable one at the beginning of our careers and so…

"a year after Russia swallowed Crimea, the EU is moving into the propaganda business in a bid to win an information war it is currently losing... the EU’s spin-team is to be largely made up of the same civil servants who have so miserably failed to convince the bloc’s own citizens of the benefits of Europe. Having worked with EU officials for alm…

"What was originally intended to be a simple and user-friendly tool for all EU citizens has turned out to be cumbersome and challenging in its use... Stakeholders have come up with concrete recommendations on how to adjust the instrument... first report on the application of the ECI Regulation by 1 April 2015 ... the first step towards a revision…

Excellent intro to "Contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to an environment different from the one in which it was developed. ... The most difficult work is often the “soft” work of adjusting mental models, learning to differentiate between universal principles and their specifi…

"Q. Is it realistic to think that a European public sphere could ever be created? TGA: My view is that we should try, but we shouldn’t ever kid ourselves that this is going to be like a national public sphere. Apart from anything else, we speak different languages, which is a huge barrier. The key for me, in continuing to make the argument for …

"POLITICO and Axel Springer, the owners of the POLITICO joint venture in Europe, announced today that they have acquired EUROPEAN VOICE and will rebrand the respected Brussels publication as POLITICO in the spring of 2015." - POLITICO & Axel Springer Announce Joint Acquisition of European Voice - POLITICO Press Release

"... renamed European Voice ... a series of subscription-based newsletters à la Washington and a web site with free content. ... “Our subscriptions are with individuals, companies, trade associations, lobbyists, they’ve got a lot of money ... This is not news for your mother, unless you’re mother’s a lobbyist. Or your father, unless your father’s…