Back in my days as a civil servant one phrase dominated UK government-speak: evidence-based policy-making. The essential idea was to gather adequate evidence about a problem, and how various solutions could work, and determine a policy choice based on that. Now of course this was constrained by the ideology of...
For the last 5 days the picture shown above has been shared far and wide on Twitter (link to the tweet), and to a certain extent on Facebook too. The title “Politicians discussing global warming” and the stunning picture match perfectly. I too was one of the people who...
Just over a week ago, as the EU Twittersphere was starting to turn its attention to the EPP’s Dublin Congress, I wondered what presence – if any – Jean-Claude Juncker had on Twitter. None was the answer. So on 2nd March, at 2117 CET, I registered @JC_Juncker, a spoof Twitter...
Angela Merkel spoke in London earlier today, and – as could have been predicted in advance – it was one of the most interesting political stories of the day in UK and indeed EU and German politics. A BBC story with all the background can be found here. Such events...
I’m growing rather tired of loads of complaints on Twitter… about Twitter. Redesigns, changes to the chronological listing of tweets, pictures appearing in-stream by default are common complaints I keep on reading. This has prompted analysis, and even odd browser-based work arounds. Why is all of this so annoying? Because...
2014 is going to be quite a year for the EU. It’s election time! And will we all toast the end of José Manuel Barroso’s political career? And Ashton too? And might election turnout increase to a level higher than Viviane Reding’s hair? Anyway, these, and any other EU question,...
I joined Twitter (@jonworth) just over five years ago. Now with 40659 tweets, 9665 followers, and following 4641, I have accumulated a fair amount of experience using the network – and that’s just with my own personal account, let alone the dozens of accounts I have for other purposes. I’ve...
So we’ve organised a whole bunch of EU Tweetups in Brussels. But two of the three of us that started it in Brussels, Anne Laumen and I, now live in Berlin. So why not bring #EUtweetup to Berlin too? Hence do come along to the first #EUTweetup, Berlin, from 1800...
2014 is the big change-over year in the EU institutions. A new European Parliament will be elected in May 2014, and a new European Commission will take office in late autumn 2014. Some Commissioners will stay on, but probably with new portfolios, and others will not return after 2014. Some...
🚨 This blog post – and the guide “How to find a flat in Berlin” – are now over 6 years old. And I am now looking for a new flat in Berlin. You can read about that here. And a whole new guide will be written at the end...
Summer is over. Everyone is back to work tweeting about politics. So that means it’s time to get the political twitter nerds together to meet in real life. For those of you that have not been to one of these before (we’ve run at least three before), the idea is...
Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Christian Friis Bach has been coming in for some heavy criticism today on Twitter (his account is here) for his statements about Danish aid to Egypt. As a result I looked at his Twitter profile for the first time for some months and it’s quite...