Hello TCampers!
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Information that's published has to have a purpose - we are giving you this information for this reason, and people need the skills to understand it. Commercial orgs understand that you have to present information to be used.
A network of people would be useful. Network of citizens helping citizens.
Comes down to whether democratic reform of the EU is possible. EU is not something close to them, unlike the nation state, so there's less active involvement.
Are the EU institutions democratazable? Open for a change? Do they want to be transparent?
Seems like they were created for one purpose and are changing underway
Find the specific things that show impact on the people - for example how cohesion money is spent
Wholesale change unlikely - work where the work is possible and show the new way.
Article on Anonymous Eurocrat in Guardian was interesting. Lots of internal stuckness.
We should get them to give the data on how they make the decisions - Ombudsman on the Trialogues.
Is decision-making transparent in any country though?
What would be an ideal process of democratic decision-making & citizen dialogue?
Pilot open policy making on different topics.
Is the scale insurmountable - not as long as there is a sense of European identity, as well as a sense of national identity.
To breed chickens you don't need to know what came first.
Tweet analysis on the EP - just the starting point of how public the decision making process is - insight into how decisions are made.
The policy making process and the political groups activity shall be 'translated' for the general public
Would greater transparency actually improve democracy?
Most corrupt countries definitely show the least trust, not sure more transparency would be bad.
Publishing information about corruption decreases the trust even more (though rightfully so) =P
EU is built of many institutions, for example, Council, which is built of member states
Sometimes the lack of transparency is helpful for the politicians who want to support the "other" side without exposing themselves to criticism from their political family.
Diplohack Brussels produced a tool to predict a country's vote in Council based on their GDP
Here are the projects that came up as a result
http://diplohack.brussels/showcases
We need more infomediaries - various agents between the governments, corporations and the citizens: journalists, apps, ngos, stories, narratives
Fact based politics is not something that we do enough (said a campaigner)
We always look for data and info because we're information addicts. But humans are emotional bejings and look for emotional reasons to make decisions, we have to work out how we can acknowledge that.
We have the data but we don't have the narrative. How can we make space for narrative within the public sphere.
Can we create narrative(s)?
It's the best what the data can do.