Growth, jobs and more

The "Lisbon Strategy" alias "the strategy for growth and jobs" is resulting in growth, does create jobs, but is not something that the Europeans would care about. I tried to run "lisbon strategy" through Google Trends and the result was: Your terms - "lisbon strategy" - do not have enough search volume to show graphs. Translation: nobody cares. Very few people know that the strategy sets targets such as investing 3% of GDP in R&D, that it calls for 70% employment, for 25% reduction in administrative burden or 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The strategy will be updated in spring 2008 under the Slovenian presidency. The discussions about the update started earlier this year. Portugal (as the current presidency) and Slovenia (as the next) established good cooperation. On Tuesday the Commission published its view on the past and future of the Strategy that is taking many of those discussions into account. As a very early adopte...

One of the themes somehow neglected in the Lisbon strategy to date has been creativity . Indeed there has been much discussion about knowledge, r&d and innovation, but creativity is more than this. At some point I'd like to write a longer post about this, however, for now just let me share some slides. The deck shared is a basis for three presentations I did lately, one last week at the Future of Europe Summit in Andorra , one today for Heads of delegations of the Commission to member states and one at the Pre-presidency conference, both in Ljubljana. The slides also include a discussion on the priority areas of the updated Lisbon Strategy, a view on its structure etc.

I have been involved in publishing on the World-Wide-Web since 1992 and with scholarly publishing since 1995, also as a co-editor of a peer-reviewed journal ITcon and a coordinator of a framework program SciX, that was studying the topic in depth. The bottom line is that in the scientific publishing process there is a decreasing value added by the publishers. The research is funded by the governments or the industry, performed by the researchers, papers are written and reviewed by them for free, only at the very end a publisher comes along that takes over the copyright, publishes the work and sells the journal at great expense to the community that created and edited the content for free. At the Competitiveness (Internal market, Industry and Research) Council meeting in Brussels, on 22 and 23 November 2007 a conclusion has been reached on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation . It recognizes: the major contribution of universities, internati...

Soon after I became a government minister in March 2007 I started a blog in Slovenian language . A very natural decision, because I have been a computer geek since early 1980s. I blog to share my thoughts about politics, science and technology, research and development, sustainable development, day to day life etc. And also to get feedback from the citizens, sometimes even from colleagues-politicians. In the first half of 2008, Slovenia is taking over the presidency of the EU , more specifically, it will preside over the European Council. Ministers of our government are involved in the preparations and will be involved in the presidency. So there is much to blog about in English as well. The European Union, as an abstract entity, is aware of the problem of communicating the policies to the citizens . But the EU are also very concrete people with ideas, thoughts and worries. As a minister in a member state government I am one of them. By taking an open, direct, two way approach to commu...