Change we can believe in

EUhackathon 2011

The first edition of the EUhackathon took place on the 8th and 9th of November 2011 in Brussels.

This hack-a-thon brought together 54 participants from 17 different nationalities to work on two challenges around the theme of transparency on the Internet.

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. Coders worked on updating this code as a means to provide consumers with greater knowledge about the quality and speed of their Internet connections.
Google's Transparency Report shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove content from their services. Coders worked to improve this, by creating new and interesting visualizations.

EU Vice-President Neelie Kroes incharge of the Digital Agenda offered her support and congratulations at the Awards Ceremony.

The hackathon winners were:

For the Internet Quality Track measuring network speeds:

First Prize: Team Ferioli (Federica Cau, Pasquale De Luna and Nicola Ferioli) – Italy - with Internet Performance Analysis
Second Prize: Team Maggi (Federico Maggi, Roman Kochanek, Francesco Roveta, Alessandro Frossi, Alberto Volpato) – Italy
Third Prize: Team Artimon (Alexandru Artimon, Ionut Dobre, Florin Barhala, Walter Schneider) – Romania

For the Global Transparency Track:

First Prize: UN-Team (Sven Clement, Hauke Gierow, Stefan Wehrmeyer) – Luxembourg And Germany - with their game: ‘Beat the Censor‘
Second Prize: Niels Rasmussen – Denmark
Third Prize: Team Indigeni Digitali (Giuliano Iacobelli, Alessandro Manfredi, Claudio Squarcella, David Funaro, Matteo Collina) – Italy

(via Google Policy Blog and http://www.euhackathon.eu/)

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Meet the European Parliament Communications team

Writing for (y)EU - Full edit from Web Com on Vimeo.

Superb video by Julien Frisch introducing the Web Communications team of the European Parliament. The team consists of 39 people writing and publishing the daily news about the European Parliament in 22 languages! They describe themselves as:

[...] a mixed bag linguistically and culturally, we are also a new and relatively young team. Most of us are in our first job in the EU institutions and only really came together as a team at the beginning of 2007. We hope that we have a fresh and young perspective on what happens in the Parliament. At the same time, we are professionals, committed to our job of communicating to real people, in comprehensible language, what this Parliament is doing in their name. This is also the reason we have decided to start this blog.

The blog is an eclectic mix of stories on politics, social media, europe and their travels around the parliament.

For more from the team, catch them on Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

(H/T TechPresident)

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State of the eUnion - Government 2.0 and onwards

John Gotze, editor of the book, explained the importance of Gov 2.0 in an interview with Federal News Radio:

For more on the State of the e-Union check out:

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Advising 1 million people on their political identity

EuProfiler.eu won this years World eDemocracy Forum Award. It's an online tool that was used by 2,5 million citizens during the last European elections. Over 1 million people completed the procedures and received advice on the political party most similar to their ideals. It's an impartial tool that allowed citizens to compare their opinions with those of over 300 European political parties before voting in June's European Parliament elections. It allowed citizens to easily find the political party matching their political identity.

It explains itself as a Voting Advice Application and:

an impartial tool designed to inform potential voters and other interested users about the political landscape in Europe ahead of the European Parliament elections in June 2009. Amongst others, it provides answers to the following questions: Which parties are running? Where do they stand on the important issues? Where do I stand in relation to the parties? All of these questions and more are answered in the few minutes it takes to fill out a questionnaire.

Professors Alexandre Trechsel and Fabian Breuer of the European Institute of Florence explained their motivations for the project at the recent e-Democracy awards workshop.