Brussels - When I came to Brussels just over three years now, European Politicians were not on Facebook, election ads were not made or broken by one’s twitter adeptness and no one in the European Commission had been told that any of these should be an option.
In the European Parliament I remember not more than one year ago having a discussion with a Parliamentary Assistant on whether their high profile MEP should even consider twitter as I was championing it and they had seen their employer’s reluctance, not irrelevance to politics.

On a recent blog post of Jon Worth’s I rediscovered the concept and unexpected results of Change.gov the Obama administration’s attempt at inviting opinion into the legislation process ‘for the first time’ or at least the means.

Fast forward to the end of 2010 and what we have is an electronic shift, politicians are taking the challenge – all but Jose Manuel Barroso seem to be tweeting whether full time or part time additionally added to by a press team and even Barroso has all spokespeople tweeting away to make the process of being in touch with the Commission that much quicker if needed. And it works – they don’t need more than that. Open Government is not only necessary but being established by the last Belgian Presidency conference of the year (I believe) which was the Lift Off towards Open Government Conference where Herman Van Rompuy made a funny about Wikilieaks and Neelie Kroes announced the European eGovernment Action Plan 2011-2015.

One of my favorites has been opengov.gr and one of their labs where the introduction of a fixmystreet.co.uk (obvi­ously to be fixmystreet.gr) was discussed as an upcoming project in Athens! I cannot tell you how many times I complain about the footpaths in Greece – this would be a Christmas miracle! But, I digress..

Back to Mr Van Rompuy and the Wikileaks aside… I don’t want to also jump on the bandwagon and try to get an extra 200 clicks by putting Mr Assange’s fame next to mine – that’s not the point – nor do I want to get into the debate of whether he’s a terrorist, an unethical freedom fighter or the best thing to happen to diplomacy since Fareed Zakaria was editing Foreign Affairs, but, what I do want to give him Kudos for is taking over the media for the last month or so.

Touche.

I do see a space for an overhaul of public documents and their structure for a barrier breakdown between what journalists and the public see and what actually gets reported. But now that it has begun I also marvel at the simplicity of such a site as opengov.gr for example – and similar projects in governments around Europe and the world.

Listening to Vivek Kundra at the Open Government Conference, the first information Officer appointed by President Obama in the US in March of 2009 to streamline all digital projects was an eye opener. But then the Obama administration has not only appointed officers on ICT but also on Innovation and tries to look a the holistic picture.

As one Commission official explained to the audience at the same conference in Brussels in Europe we try to revive even the dead policies that you know should be left alone and prolong non workable projects as much as possible.

The Cloud could be the future of it all, the US could be a template of it all, and although seemingly heavy and immovable even the Commission has managed to tweet its way into 2011 (not to mention the treaty changes that just seem to happen left right and center these days at the European Council, but that’s another column). I’ll leave all these thoughts with you and wish you an abundant 2011 (Year of the Rabbit where we’ll all have a great time according to the Chinese) and with Neelie Kroes’ (Vice President of the European Commission Responsible for the Digital Agenda) closing remark at the Open Government Conference.

 “Europe should be the world’s laboratory for innovation in the public sector. We have the talent, the imperative and the technologies. We must be very concrete. Find the real problems in our pilots and experiences and deal with them. That is the recipe for getting Every European Digital,” Commissioner Kroes said.

That is the recipe for the next steps ahead.

I’m heading to the kitchen.
 
Alia Papageorgiou is New Europe’s Eurocentrique columnist, and a former EU Affairs Editor at New Europe newspaper