The Week in Bloggingportal: Barroso Buzzword Bingo
© European Parliament // Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0
Let me start our summary of the past Week in Bloggingportal with an outlook to the coming week and propose that you participate in our “Barroso Buzzword Bingo”:
In two days, on Tuesday at 9 am, European Commission President Barroso will hold the first “State of the [European] Union” address, which we wouldn’t even have noticed if Honor Mahony (of the EUobserver) hadn’t blogged about it this week.
To celebrate the massive event and to spotlight Barroso who is known for his great speeches, your Bloggingportal team (with special credit to co-editor Jon Worth for the idea) is proposing a pan-European buzzword bingo, a popular game also known as bullshit-bingo.
We would kindly ask you to propose 10 buzzwords - excluded are “EU”, “European Union” or any names of EU bodies - that you expect to pop up during Barroso’s speech and to post them on your blogs and to copy the link to your posts in the comments to this article. If you don’t have a blog (or don’t want to waste a blog post on Barroso), you can also put the 10 buzzwords directly into the comments. And don’t hesitate to do this in your preferred European language!
The winners, those with the correct or especially creative lists, will get a special mention in the next Week in Bloggingportal; speechwriters from the European Commission and their families are excluded from the game.
Now, this state of the Union thing we are going to witness in Strasbourg next week seems to be part of what the EU Commission has announced as their “communication revolution”, a revolution that is so obviously old-school and so “20th century” that it has received nothing but laughter and pity in the euroblogosphere, for example by La Com Européenne, Watts on… or Grahnlaw.
Why does the Commision think we need a communication revolution centralised around a political leader without any charisma? Because the EU is the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in the member states? Because it’s easier to have more communication instead of more democracy, like the proposal to have a directly elected Commission president? Because the Commission just wants to control what the “facts” are? Or because it thinks this will prevent the old-school tabloids from printing EU stories that are untrue?
In the end, focussing on individual persons can also backlash, as in the case of Home Affairs Commissioner Malmström who in an interview this week told that she was hurt by getting the nickname “Censilia” during the very personalised debate on whether to introduce EU legislation to block websites or not. Centralising communication can also make forget that the EU is not a centralised federation and that already now several complaints for the breach of the Lisbon Treaty subsidarity rules are under way, as EU ZOO noted.
Apart from these EU communication issues, the Bloggingportal.eu editors have highlighted some more interesting issues during this week:
Marek Siwiec had positive words for the new Polish president and his pro-EU gestures during his visit to Brussels and Romaninan MEP Corina Cretu blamed the EU Commission to be an accomplice in the eviction of Roma from France.
L’Europe de la Défense, reporting about the visit of the chairman of the EU’s military committee to Moscow, asked the pertinent question why the Russian press seemed well-informed about the content of the talks while the Europeans have nothing to say about it. And Mary Honeyball complains about the UK government not implementing the EU directive on trafficking of human beings.
Also this week, Bloggingportal co-editor Europasionaria was interviewed among other female European bloggers by cafebabel and (French) blogger-activist Jeremie Zimmermann of La Quadrature du Net has been talking about EU net politics (in English) with (the German blog) Netzpolitik for their 100th podcast.
And last but not least, Brussels Sunshine criticised that financial lobbyists are “educating” Members of the European Parliament while Lino over at the Lobby Planet explained why it is not the best idea for a lobbyist like her to write a book about EU lobbying.
So, as you can see, the summer is slowly coming to an end, and EU politics and euroblogs are taking up speed again, promising an invigorating autumn that we here at Bloggingportal.eu will follow closely with well-informed disrespect.
PS: Don’t forget to make your Barroso Buzzword Bingo list before Tuesday!
UPDATE: Our little competition has been picked up by New Europe in an article here.
Buzz-word Bingo ! I love that.
Here is my selection:
Some unlikely words: Allegator (someone who alleges), Coopetion(cooperation/competition), Truthiness, empowerment,
Some “we-can-always-dream” words: Blog-*, Responsibility
Some words it’d just be funny to hear Barroso says: Pancakes, Wibbly-wobbly,
And to finish, some serious/lame words: Leadership, Innovation
Getting definitely back out of my vacation myself, this is going to be a great week.
Being a bit lazy, I will refer to my EU2020 buzzword bingo from February this year: http://www.lobbyplanet.eu/eu2020-buzzword-bingo/
The grid for fun family evenings can be downloaded here: http://www.lobbyplanet.eu/wp-content/uploads/EU2020%20Buzzword%20Bingo.pdf
Selecting 10 of the 24 words generated by a single throw of the dice at Tom Davis’s Buzzword Bingo (http://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/), I get:
world class
helicopter view
challenge
take the initiative
convergence
state of the art
targeting innovation
diversity
synergy
opportunities
I hope phrases are allowed?
- Mathew
[...] one of my co-editors over at Bloggingportal Towers, has written a cracking edition of The Week in Bloggingportal. Barroso will be delivering the first “State of the [European] Union” address this [...]
Great initiative! You can find my buzzwords here!
May as well post them here as well:
1. Austerity
2. “Financial crisis”
3. “Tighten our belts”
4. “Difficult road ahead”
5. Solidarity
6. Principles
7. Values
8. Together
9. “Yes we can!”
10. “F#%k it… we’re screwed.”
1. “Thank you”
2. “It’s good to see so many of you here”
3. Crisis
4. Solidarity
5. Relevant
6. Do more with less
7. Member states
8. Europe 2020
9. Challenge
10. Lisbon
1. Innovation
2. Crisis
3. Regulation
4. Efforts
5. Blame
6. China
7. Investment
8. Competitive
9. [EU] Citizens
10. Terrorism
Buzzwords he won’t use:
1) Love
2) Creativity
3) “We have made mistakes.”
4) Net neutrality
5) Socialists
6) Ideology
7) Dignity
8 ) God
9) My Wife
10) Dream
Try “sustainable”, “inclusive”, “recovery”, “crisis”, “smart”, “new”…
Since all my buzzwords are already taken in English, I will write them in Italian (with few add) in the spirit of European multilinguism. In the end, such a milestone speech will be certainly translated in all 23 official languages of the European Union!
Enjoy my “2 cents”!
1. nuovo inizio (new beginning) or alternatively “padri fondatori” (I think he will put a reference to the founding fathers in such a speech!)
2. crisi economica
3. “smart”
4. futuro sostenibile
5. disoccupazione
6. immigrazione
7. conoscenza e innovazione – energia – agenda digitale
8. priorità
9. comunicazione
10 competizione globale
[...] the guys (and girls) at bloggingportal.eu have had the brilliant idea to play Barroso Buzzword Bingo. The idea is quite simple, pick 10 words that you think are most likely to come up in [...]
Future, inclusion, together, unity, challenge, institutional architecture, sterile, colleagues, debate, ambitious
Great idea!
My list:
1. “solidarity”.
2. “pessimisim”.
3. “communication”.
4. “leading role”.
5. “our European values”. (Though it’d be a big plus if he said “the moral authority of Europe”!).
6. “sustainable”.
7. “resolve”.
8. “resilient”.
9. “partnership”.
10. “citizens”.
What will be the hastag for this – #SOTEU ? Sadly I won’t be able to follow along live.
I came up with so many words but couldn’t decide which ones to pick, so I decided to go alphabetical:
Austerity
Budget
Confidence
Debt
Economy
Financial crisis
Government
Help
Immigration
Jail [*fingers crossed!:)*]
1. President
2. Member States
3. social partners
4. citizens
5. challenges
6. crisis
7. Commission
8. strategy
9. social market economy
10. framework instruments
Looks like we’re onto a winner with “solidarity!”
1. synergy
2. member states
3. challenges
4. European project
5. Europe 2020
6. united
7. “If Europe does not get more united it gets more dis-united.”
8. “The EU interest is more than the sum of the national interests.”
9. strong
10. future
And: values, crisis, Union and “erm…” “um..”
Here are a few:
1. citizens
2. EU 2020
3. crisis
4. financial
5. economic
6. growth
7. sustainable
8. inclusive
9. reform
10. supervision
Sadly, a few good ones had to be left outside the top ten.
Words that will likely not be included: “listen”, “understand”, “transparent”, “citizen” and “minorities”
Here is the speech:
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/10/411&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
And below the speech in Wordle Cloud format:
Happy to see the he actually said 3 out of the 5 that I didn’t expect. Only “listen” and “understand” where not mentioned.
@Brusselsblogger unfortunately, these were very important words that would have been very helpful for sending a message about the willingness of the EC to be more responsive… oh well, wasn’t to be expected.
[...] At Bloggingportal we came up with the idea of having a laugh at the expense of our esteemed Presiden…, Jose Manuel Barroso with his “State of the European Union” speech by playing bullshit bingo. [...]
[...] mixed, with the balance tipped slightly towards the negative. Last week, we set up a game of “Buzzword Bingo” to try and liven up the event. The results are in, and we can announce that we have a [...]
[...] last year, we at Bloggingportal.eu have made fun of this “State of the European Union” (#SOTEU), and Jon was the first to call for a revival of [...]