The Week in Bloggingportal: Talking about the future

It was a quiet week on the Bloggingportal “Editors’ Choice” stream (RSS).

And since it was so quiet, you might have actually found the time to watch notable EU politics scholar Simon Hix – who is also one of the persons behind Votewatch.eu – speaking about “The State of European Democracy After Lisbon“.

Or you may have taken the time to read Commissioner Piebalg’s letter to the Member States and the European Parliament in which he sets out his vision for development policy and invites us all to comment. Although I don’t see any comments there?!

But if not, you did at least notice that ten countries are planning to intervene in the crucifix case at the European Court of Human Rights. You remember that one? Italy lost the first round, being told that it should take away the crosses from classrooms. The case is now going to the Grand Chamber of the Court for a final judgement and several European countries want to prove that they haven’t learnt anything after several hundred years on enlightenment…

Oh, and speaking of absurdities: Kevin Townsend couldn’t resist but to notice the irony of the fact that a legal opinion saying that international negotiation documents may not be kept secret from the European Parliament is kept secret from the public.

However, while the Bloggingportal stream was rather quiet, we editors weren’t quiet at all.

A good bunch of us – Europasionaria from Europasionaria.eu, Kosmopolit & Anda from Kosmopolito.org, Martin from europaeum, Mathew the Tagsmanian Devil, Stefan and me (joined by Dave from Gulf Stream Blues) - sat down in Brussels to discuss how to further develop Bloggingportal, a debate that we are having on our mailing list for a while already.

We know we have to improve the website’s interface and functionality to get more visibility for the great content European bloggers are contributing every day because this is the main purpose of Bloggingportal.eu: Support creative, intelligent, funny, insightful, blogging on European affairs while creating a common European interactive space for the diverse bunch of activities we call “euroblogging”.

But since we, the editors, are doing all this without any funds and just in our spare time, we were brainstorming on where to get the necessary support and funds to implement the necessary changes that go beyond our present temporal, financial and technical possibilities.

So we need additional support to redesign the platform but we rather don’t want to lose the spirit of being an open platform organised by volunteers without external financial influences. Nevertheless, we also didn’t avoid the question whether this type of network-organisation will actually bring us forward or whether we need to think about new organisational forms, too.

There are no final answers yet, so if you have any ideas how we can make Bloggingportal.eu better and how to get the additional support we need, feel free to comment and to join our discussion!

PS.: We also promoted the article “Financial Re-Regulation and Democracy“, but the website Social Europe seems to have problems at the moment…

Picture: centralasian / CC BY 2.0