First, a widely-read blogger, Jon Worth, blogged about the site, speculating that Parliament was spending about four million euros on the site.

No Aahmed. I made it very clear from the outset that I did not know the precise source of the money. I found two budget lines, each allocating 4 million Euro to ESN, the web agency behind Citzalia, and linked to those. I made it clear that I did not know whether this was the case. Plus no information about funding was made available on the Citzalia website when I wrote the first piece. If you assumed you could just avoid any critique of your project then you are naive and stupid, and if you knew you were going to be criticised and did not think to explain how the project is funded then you’re just stupid.

He then went on to use Citzalia as an example, rather bizarrely, of the Parliament’s supposedly collective aim to squish a measure that allows EU citizens to bring forth legislative issues by referendum.

The words I used were “All of this seems especially poignant just now as the European Parliament seems to be doing its best to kill off the European Citizens’ Initiative” – which Aahmed then twists into Citzalia squashing the citizens’ initiative. No… What I am saying is that the European Parliament cannot get its initiatives for regular democracy right, and until it does that, why is it creating models for virtual democracy?

Since then, the four-million-euro figure has been carried by other blogs, despite our post correcting the original spark.

Yes – all those blogs had posted the 4 million figure long before there was any formal response from ESN. I even posted comments on many blogs correcting the figure before ESN did. The official reaction was just too slow.

The original blogger himself amended the article to use the correct figures but also responded that we should have contacted him as soon as he blogged his speculation. Huh?

Yeah, huh. You informed me about this project, direct to me via Twitter, a super-fast medium. I post a reply direct to you, to the Citzalia account, stating I don’t agree, with a link to the blog entry. Everyone blogs and speculates for half a day, with no reply whatsoever from the Citzalia team, who then freak out. Come on folks! I might have a widely read blog, but I am a one person operation, and blogging is a hobby. You have 20+ staff, a €275k budget, Google alerts, RSS feeds and hell I even informed you I had written the blog entry! If you were not ready to monitor the reactions to your project you should have not released information about it in the first place.

Your problem Aahmed, and indeed ESN overall, is you were actually made to look rather silly by a bunch of amateurs on this issue. Use of social media is not just nice and smily and chirpy and new and funky – it’s a hard world too. Maybe after this episode you could have learnt that a little, but judging from your piece you seem to think I’m responsible for the whole episode, so it looks like there has been scant little learning going on.

My original blog entry was posted at 0935 this morning, after I was first made aware of the project from this tweet at about 1800 yesterday. It then took until 1539 today until Paolo, one of the project officers at ESN, posted this comment in reply to my piece, setting things straight about the budget.

I absolutely stand by everything written in the original blog entry – I made it clear that I was not certain about the budgets for this, and as a result I have posted comments on all the blogs that have mentioned the story, pointing out the new information supplied by ESN. I’m posting those comments as I’m conscious of my reputation as a blogger – surely ESN ought to be doing this too, and quickly?

Beyond that questions have to be asked about the broader communications here. It’s not as if I’m kind and mild on this blog, and while I want the EU to exist, want the UK to be in the EU, and indeed want a federal Europe, I also – very strongly – want the European Union to be efficient, democratic and avoid waste. Anyone who has ever read a few of my blog entries over the months and years can surely see this – I’m not just ‘pro-European‘.

Surely today’s case shows, once again, that EU bloggers now matter in the Brussels bubble, and they have the power to inflict some damage.

Citzalia is democracy in action. It is role playing game and social networking forum wrapped in a virtual 3D world that captures the essence of the European Parliament. You may even recognise parts of the building [...] Current Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and European officials will be on hand to guide you through the procedures and provide background information.

I don’t really know quite where to start to critique this, so perhaps I’ll start with the positive – the graphic design for the site, even the draft so far, has been meticulously delivered by ESN – it all looks smart and crisp. So I can’t fault the agency.

The question I simply cannot answer is why is the European Parliament spending money on this?

Thanks to the research of some fellow EU bloggers we reckon this is financed from €4 million allocated to ESN in a 2008 budget line from the EP – see page 21 of this PDF. In the same period ESN has done this project for the EP, presumably under the same funding line? The only other similar line is this from the Commission, but Citzalia looks like an explicitly EP project. If someone knows the precise answer to these funding questions please do leave a comment. [UPDATE - 6.8.2010, 15:45] See the comment below from ESN – funding totals €275k, from a different funding line than the one I had suggested.

All of this seems especially poignant just now as the European Parliament seems to be doing its best to kill off the European Citizens’ Initiative – a way for citizens to have a direct (rather than a virtual) impact on EU decision making. How about using some EP money to deliver a simple to use, online petition platform for the ECI? Surely simpler to program than a virtual European Parliament!

Education about the European Parliament is important, sure, but the problem for the EP is however much people learn it’s not likely to make them more favourable towards it, for the EP has a structural problem – individual MEPs matter to individual pieces of legislation, but the overall direction of European integration and even the composition of the European Commission are too little influenced by whether the EP is controlled by the left or the right. So inform people, sure, but the incentive for Members of the European Parliament to really effectively communicate themselves is still lacking. No amount of slick websites can possibly address that.

All of this rather reminds me of the MyParl.eu story from 2008 – a social networking system for MEPs which was then ditched. I wrote then that it’s simpler for MEPs to approve a few million Euro for a website than it is to actually get them communicating effectively themselves, and that seems to hold true for Citzalia as well. I really fear this is going to become a virtual ghost European Parliament with high costs and very few users.

[UPDATE - 6.8.2010, 10:45]
Please note: I am not saying this site cost €4 million – I don’t know the precise sum. I am saying that as far as I am aware the funding came from within €4 million of funds allocated to ESN. Those are rather different things.

If you’re an elected representative, what does an e-mail mean? If it’s from a constituent, individually written, it’s clear enough. But what about if it’s part of a campaign? In the clip above Clay Shirky argues that the predictive value of an e-mail for a member of Congress is zero, and with e-mail campaigns its impossible to rescue the signal from noise. Have we put the barrier to political engagement so low that it can cease to be meaningful? I can’t claim to have the answers, but watch the clip and have a bit of a think. The clip starts at the best bit of the presentation, but the rest is worth watching too.

Netroots Sörmland Group

I spent a few hours today at a seminar about left wing blogging in Sweden in Eskilstuna, a medium sized town 90 minutes south west of Stockholm. I was invited there by Fredrik Pettersson, one of my web clients. My presentation from the seminar is here, but this blog entry is inspired by the comments of Johan Ulvenlöv – the guy behind [s-buzz] and Netroots Sweden.

For me the main lesson today is that the Swedish Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna) and, to an extent the Greens (Miljöpartiet) and Left (Vänsterpartiet) are starting to develop their own concept of online organising and online agenda setting. This is best manifested in the forthcoming Netroots Sweden book dedicated to the theme, and this neat map of the Swedish political blogosphere.

The reflections in the room were – in as far as I can understand the Swedish – about developing online activism per se, but importantly using the network of 600+ Netroots bloggers in more than 100 cities across Sweden to deliver concrete results.

There’s plenty of activity on the left online in the UK – through Left Foot Forward, Labour List, Liberal Conspiracy, Next Left, and on Twitter. But how does that fit into the vision of the Labour Party in the future? The UK seems to be at a stage where the online (party-)political discourse still reflects the offline and mainstream media discourse and follows and amplifies that. Then the real innovation is in government services on the web – much of it starting from MySociety for example, while web politics still remains under developed in the UK.

Johan, in conversations after his presentation, was keen to emphasise that the technology is just a tiny part of what the two staff in Socialdemokraterna party HQ are doing when it comes to blogger outreach – the vast majority is networking people, getting them to meet, and building solidarity and trust between them offline as well as online. Why, he asked, were there no Brits at Netroots Nation in the USA? Events like Sunny’s Blog Nation 2010 are a start, but inspired by today trying to further build and train blog networks on the left in the UK is for sure one of the things I’ll be devoting time to from the autumn when I’m back in London.

The Newport spoof (ace, especially for me as I grew up there, 1.2 million views at the time of writing)

The Brussels (half-)spoof (where I live now, 26k views, some catching up to do!)

Set all of those playing all at once and you’ll sure get an interesting mix!

Camels - CC / Flickr

It’s one of the problems I have as a freelancer, and I’m not alone in this – how much am I supposed to charge for the web design services I provide? An invoice running to hundreds or even thousands of pounds or Euros sounds scary for most of the people I work with.

Most of my clients are politicians – many MPs in Westminster – and they each, personally, get a salary of about £64000. Yet the only people they are used to paying are researchers and interns on a month by month basis and there’s no understanding of how a freelancer’s work is organised. One Brussels politician once told me €700 was the upper limit for payment for her complicated site, oblivious to the fact that she was spending €16000 / month on staffing expenses. OK, not the same budget lines, but go figure it out. Needless to say these politicians’ own salaries are at least twice my own.

Let’s look at this the other way – from the point of view of my expenses.

I’m moving to London in September as most of my clients are there. I’ll be working from home most of the time, I’m in my early 30s, and I need space to work. So no flat-sharing (I need a place to myself) so my rent is going to be £850 / month. Add telephone, internet, utilities, council tax and the total is about £1000. Add onto that HMRC self assessment payments on account of £415 / month and that’s more than £1400 before I have even bought some food at the supermarket… Then comes travel to meet clients, overheads for web hosting, costs for accountants.

Then take a working month. Theoretically (ha!) out of 30 days I am supposed to take weekends off, so 22 days total. At least one day a week I need to organise my finances, chase up clients that have not paid. So that’s 18 days.

I need to be invoicing at least £500 / week just to keep things turning, and ideally something close to £800. That means I need to launch 3 simple-ish WordPress websites each and every month. 36 new sites a year! There are already close to 100 sites still running that I’ve designed or developed in the past, each with their unique legacy, and that legacy never reduces in size. Alternatively I could take on larger projects that operate on the basis of some form of retainer.

So that’s the reason for the camels pictured here. I’m lumping a heavier and heavier weight onto my back. I have major responsibility for a huge number of sites and I have considerable personal financial responsibilities. And the gap between these things is rather narrow just at the moment.

5 Years Birthday Cake - CC / Flickr

On 19th July 2005 I wrote a small blog entry about my frustrations with Ryanair, and also explained my blogging debut. “Am I too late jumping on the blogging bandwaggon?” I mused at the time. Looking back it for sure was not too late, and indeed many of the top blogs – especially those on the left in the UK – have ceased. When it comes to blogging about the EU, only Nosemonkey has been at it longer.

It has been an interesting road since then, racking up – at the time of writing – 1208 posts and 7584 comments. Almost every one of the posts has at least one image – rather rare for a political blog.

In 2006 the blog was rated 10th best in UK politics in Iain Dale’s lists (2006 and 2007 scores here) before dropping off the UK blogging radar due to excessive EU geekiness. My 2006 failure at the Commission entrance exams has created one of the most active places to discuss the concours with 3516 comments so far across 2 posts. A post in September 2007 (updated here) led to the creation of Bloggingportal.eu. The biggest thing I’ve ever done – the Atheist Bus Campaign – started from this post in 2008, while 2009 saw the Gender Balanced Commission campaign launched from the blog. In 2010 the blog has been rated 5th most influential about the EU.

My mind works in eccentric ways, and the blog posts reflect that. From my sporting pursuits to Eurostar to the travails of the European left, from the quandaries of food emissions to World Cup footballs to the stupidity of Boris Johnson’s routemaster plans – it’s all been covered.

From a technical point of view the blog started off on pLog and for the last 4 years has been running WordPress. It has been hosted in at least 3 places, currently by the excellent EZPZ Hosting. Over the past 18 months I’ve also become a dedicated Twitter user (@jonworth) to complement the blogging, and surpassed 2000 followers the day before the 5 year anniversary of the blog.

Above all blogging has allowed me to meet excellent people all over the place, to be invited to all kinds of events and to build all sorts of projects with the people I’ve met. It’s been a hard road sometimes, but I’m never short of ideas or thoughts, and the blog has been (and will continue to be) my canvas to express what’s on my mind. Here’s to the next 5 years!