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In a “post” dated 12/08/2007 , we presented the IPEX service
(Interparliamentary Exchange) with its pros and cons.
Stephane Cottin recently (10/10/2007)
announced that the Commission (DG Communication) launched a call for tender to
improve the synergies between Members of Parliament at the European, national
or regional levels with a participative web site, a so called web 2.0 ( see explanations on Wikipedia).
Great
But after reading the specifications, available
online, some remarks must be made on this project which intends “to design and develop an Internet/Intranet
site as a platform for exchanges of ideas and interaction between European and
national parliamentarians to encourage debates on certain themes so as to
disseminate knowledge on the European Union and promote new ideas and policies
on the European Union.”
On form:
Dissemination of the calls for tender on each of the
websites of the Commission’s DGs and of other European Institutions doesn’t
facilitate transparency. It’s a boring job to browse all the pages to find the
relevant information. It would be better to centralize this important
information on the TED (“tenders electronic daily”) service and to provide
specific RSS feeds. Such an RSS feed could be inserted everywhere to please
each institution or DG (see
our French written post about the evolution of TED). TED would also allow watching
under the same heading ,all the documents of a call for tender from pre-
information at the beginning of the procedure to the final contact including questions of the tenderers and the answers. It
would also provide statistical elements (how many companies downloaded the
specifications …)
On content:
The website must be hosted by the selected tenderer (that
means outside the domain .europa.eu). This will not increase the visibility of
the site on the search engines. It is a pity that ,very often ,websites
financed by the Commission don’t use this dedicated domain.
The website must support close linking with social networks like Facebook but no wiki-forum is mentioned in
the specifications. RSS feeds don’t seem to have been foreseen. It’s a pity
because it could be a good way to “feed” exchanges with relevant documents and
information.
There is no audit tool about the use of the service. This
feature could be very important for the “fine tuning” of the service
Internet and
Intranet ? Why ? All the people involved in the discussion are most of the time outside buildings of the
Institutions. To secure confidentiality, an ID and a password are sufficient.
Linguistic editorial tasks in all official languages, correspondents
in all the EU’s countries… That is perhaps too demanding a request for SMEs
wishing to respond to a call for tender.
Surely good ideas but I am afraid it’s a non-starter.
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