EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes announced yesterday on her Facebook page that her office is launching 2 competitions for developers, innovators and start-ups, with significant financials rewards. To enter, you must create apps which respond, support and improve society, in fields like education, health or social inclusion. We are talking about prizes worth over 300,000 Euros, so our advise is to get ready and put your knowledge to good use. The apps are not geographically bound and Romania could use some related to its healthcare or education systems, for example. More details are available here and here. Good luck!
Because Romania is struggling these days with heavy snowfalls and blizzards, we have a useful recommendation for you: the Waze Romania app created a list of all closed roads and alternative detours. All data will be updated in real time as the roads open for traffic. Let us know if you find it useful!
The European Parliament organized between 24-26 January 2014 in Brussels its Europarl Hackathon for the European Elections 2014, a 2 day event aimed to reunite coders, activists, graphists and journalists and come up with solutions, apps, portals or other types of social or online tools to enhance access and understanding around European Parliamentarians and their job s and roles. Here are some selected results:
- OpenInterests [GitHub repository], by Friedrich Lindenberg: A new data set and application for searching declarations of interests by Members of the European Parliament
- EU Topics, by Chiara Girardelli, Michael Thomas, Marie Jamet, Sven Wauters: “This website allows you to see what subjects have mainly be tackled by the EU parliament over the last legislature”
- Scoring EP (user interface [alpha version], and GitHub repository), by Michal Škop and others: An application for analyzing voting on issues by Members of the European Parliament; currently covers climate change only
- La Quadrature du Net made enhancements to the “Voting Score” function of its Political Memory transparency and e-participation system for the European Parliament [HT @pudo]
- List of European Parliament data sources and data visualization tools, by Matti Schneider
Check here for a storify of Twitter tweets from the event and here to see some other results and conclusions of the meeting. The Romanian Government organized its own hackthon in February 2013, as Radu Puchiu, the Head of the Online Services and Design Department told us in a special interview.
The @Amazing_Maps team created a map of Europe mapped by tweets in different languages pic.twitter.com/A6WiR8M6pd! Amaizing!
The Netherlands have a very active online diplomatic community. The Dutch Government is commited to use social media to enhance its diplomatic communication, as His Excellency Mr. Matthijs van Bonzel, Dutch Ambassador to Romania told DigitalDiplomacy.ro in a past interview. In this 2minute video clip you can see how do Dutch diplomats use social media.
2 very important social media events to take place in Bucharest in February. Check our friend Cristian China Birta’s blog for details about the conferences and reasons you should attend. See you there!
Mistakes in social media are easy to spot, can get overblown quite quickly and can cause serious concequences. But they can also be avoided quite easily. Check the article to find out some useful tips.
For those working in NGOs, you should kow that social networks can be very useful in terms of promoting your work and the causes you fight for. Check the following article to find out social media tips for nonprofits but also how to specifically use Snapchat to support your work.
