Blogging about Reflection Group

Recently I have been appointed the secretary general of the Reflection group. Chaired by Felipe Gonzales (ex Spanish prime minister) and co-chaired by Vaira Viķe-Freiberga (ex Latvian president) and Jorma Ollila (of Nokia fame) it was given the task to "identify the key issues and developments which the Union is likely to face and to analyse how these might be addressed. This includes, inter alia: strengthening and modernising the European model of economic success and social responsibility, enhancing the competitiveness of the EU, the rule of law, sustainable development as a fundamental objective of the European Union, global stability, migration, energy and climate protection, and the fight against global insecurity, international crime and terrorism." These are perhaps the most important issues to address about the future of Europe.

I was quite hesitant, should the Secretary General of the group blog about it or anything, for that matter? Any misplaced word, opinion, idea could be given the weight it does not deserve or perhaps even discredit the end results of the Group. The issue for the members is, should they keep quiet in public, should the group deliberate in the locked room until it comes with a carefully worded final report.

But the goal of the group is also to "Particular attention should be given to ways of better reaching out to citizens and addressing their expectations and needs." There are few better ways but to use the internet. So I plan to write something from time to time. And I hope so will the members of the Reflection Group.

Popular posts from this blog

Updated! Synchronizing Moon+ Books on Android

Image
I do a lot of reading on my Android devices, phones and tablets. After a long search I selected  Moon+ Reader , the  Pro  version. The killer feature was the way bookmarks and underlining is handled. I mostly read non-fiction and like to mark important passages. And I want to be sure my marks are available forever. After I am done with a book, I create an Evernote clip from my marks and comments. With Moon+ this is done with a single click. I did most of my reading on my Nexus 7 tablet, but when my phone was getting bigger I realized it would be nice to do some reading there as well. And it would be even nicer if I could synchronize the books, notes etc. Synchronizing book files Moon+ provides functionality to sync books (.epub, .pdf ...) to cloud, but they are just pushed to cloud and this is the end of the story. They will not end up on your other device. So you need to do it like this:  Create a backup of the Moon+ main folder. Just in case. Many android f...
Read more

Rescue Operation

Image
I noticed two outlets I was publishing at, the Blogactiv and the DigitalPost went 404 . Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine and my email archive I was able to save the content and move it here - with original dates. Blogactiv (2007-2020) DigitalPost (2015-2017).
Read more

Council on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Too Little Too Late

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...
Read more