Tag Archives: Citzalia

The Citzalia plot deepens

It seems my earlier blog posts (1, 2, 3) about Citzalia, the virtual European Parliament game costing €275000, managed to put some thoughts into UKIP’s head, and specifically led to some questions to the EP’s administration asked by Godfrey Bloom MEP as reported by Gawain at England Expects.

The official response from Klaus Welle, Secretary General (i.e. highest civil servant) of the European Parliament, is that indeed there will be a budget of €275279 of which the Parliament will contribute €206450 – confirming the numbers I had dredged up with a bunch of bloggers previously.

The interesting new information from the Welle letter is that there seems to be no EP staffing money allocated to the project, meaning the danger that Citzalia operates in a virtual void is rather high.

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Oh, so Citzalia is all my fault

Aahmed ElAmin, one of the developers of Citzalia (whose words were followed hook, line and sinker by The Guardian) has penned his own side of the story at a website entitled The Royal Gazette. Odd location, and his approach to the whole thing is even odder. You can read the whole piece here, and as parts of it specifically attack me, I’ll deal with those one by one.

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.

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Handling a comms mess – Citzalia

My previous post about Citzalia has been creating waves in the small pond of EU debate throughout the day. The blog entry was first linked from Tim Worstall, then appeared in the Open Europe press review, and has then subsequently been linked by England Expects, Politics.ie, The Endless Track and Bill Cash.

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.

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Citzalia – the virtual ghost European Parliament (really, why spend money on this?)

Yesterday – thanks to this tweet – I had the dubious honour to be one of the first people to have a look at a draft website for Citzalia, a project that promises some sort of virtual European Parliament role playing game. The official blurb is as follows:

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.

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