France passed a law on digital piracy. FT reports:
Internet users who download films and music without paying for them would get three warnings before being cut off for up to a year. Until now action against illegal file sharing has been a matter for the French courts.
The debate in Europe is not if Internet piracy [...]

Speaking of Global Governance and ideas on how new financial regulation will make future crises impossible, a quote from the movie “Other People’s Money” comes to mind:
Kate Sullivan: Someday, we’ll smarten up, change some laws, and put you out of business.
Lawrence Garfield: You can change all the laws you want. You can’t stop the game. [...]

The world is in a transition from industrial and information economy into conceptual economy. Value is in meaning, not in function. The resource of this economy are talents. They are empowered by information and communication technologies. The game is how to make use of all this talent.
Businesses do open innovation, governments should do open government. [...]

I’m keep getting questions about the (success) of Slovenian presidency of the EU (PDF). So now, from a “historic” perspective of 5 months after, lets try to summarize:

Context in which Slovenia took over the presidency:

• Three years after membership, one year into the Eurozone.
• Lisbon treaty signed. Optimism about the future role of Europe in the world. Possibility to look outward, now that internal issues seem to have been resolved. However, risks that treaty is not signed in some countries. Refrain from doing anything that would put signing of the treaty in danger.
• Global uncertainty (Iraq, Afganistan conflicts; US/China trade, US interest rates).
• Global warming at its warmest.

What did we achieve:

• Confirming the European Perspective of the Western Balkans. Kosovo declared independence, but peace was maintained, and, moreover EU perspectives of all former Yugoslav republic significantly improved (stabilisation agreements with Serbia and BiH).
• Lisbon Strategy. The updated 2008 version is more modern conceptually (5th freedom, talent, creativity based on European culture, EIT seat in Budapest) and with specific practical goals (like internet penetration). Kick started the reflection process on post 2010 strategy.
• Climate Change. Kept the momentum, safeguarded the consensus, introduced some common sense (sustainability criteria for biofueles). Adopted the key prerequisite political decisions for the timely adoption the climate and energy package and made important progress in the understanding of proposed solutions and unification of the Member States’ positions. The Presidency also reached an agreement on the third legislative package for the liberalisation of the electricity and gas internal market. Including of aviation in the emission trading scheme

Factors of success:

• Extremely motivated politicians and civil servants to demonstrate, that a small new member state can do it as well. A project to which the government was dedicated with 90% of the resources.
• No single big issue to steal the focus and limelight and leave the rest in the shadow in neglected, but professional work across the board. No private national agenda but impartial, honest broker.
• Sympathetic and supportive attitude by the EU institutions and member states.
• Teamwork. Politically centrally managed from a prime minister’s office, a small ministerial task force consisting of the PM+ few key ministers.
• Early start of preparatory work; a lot was done in the fall of 2007. Drafts from the Commission and Consilium were compatible with our agenda.
• Excellent and reinforced horizontal teams in Brussels (Perm Rep) and Ljubljana (Office of European Affairs). The ministries could therefor focus on content, not on process.

What did Slovenia get out of it:

• A generation of politicians and civil servants that do not look up at Brussels, but had a level, eye-eye self confident view. The previous government was negotiating joining the EU and looked up at Brussels (and some of this feels in the incomming government again).
• Knowledge, how things really get done in Brussels, where the levers of real power are. Contacts.
• We truly, not only on paper, but with the hearts and minds became active members of the Union.

What I personally liked about it:

• Being able to put some pet topics through the institutions right into the Concil conclusions such as creativity, open access to knowledge …
• Having beer very late in the evening in Ljubljana, after the spring council, receiving an SMS from a very high EU politician reading “Well done, congratulations”.
• Getting very good feedback from the likes of Richard Florida (Creative Class), Peter Sauber (Open Access movement) or Ann Mettler (Lisbon Council) about the results.
• “Official visit” of the Slovenian delegation to the Waterstones bookshop after the council in Brussels. Bought the book “Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies” that explained why we lost the elections a few months later.

The economic and social future of Europe is mainly outlined in a strategy called “Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs”. Launched in 2000 it provides the blueprint for Europe staying competitive in the globlized economy. It so happened that at the Spring European Council ending a few minutes ago, Europe is launching the next three year cycle. The European Council is presided by Slovenia and as the Minister in charge for the Lisbon Strategy in Slovenia I imagine that I had a little bit of influence on the flavor of the strategy in its next cycle.

The first lesson learned with Slovenia in the driving seat of the EU is that it cannot make any sharp turns. The EU is much like a huge cargo ship with 27 smaller or larger tow boats trying to push it a bit in that or the other direction. And in the last couple of months we did some more pushing than one would expect from one of the smallest member states.

Since its beginnings in 2000, the Lisbon Strategy was placing high hopes on the knowledge economy - on science, technology and innovation. One of the directions I tried to push was for a fresher view on exploiting Europe’s intellectual and cultural potential. Contributing actively to the Internet communication revolution since the early 1990s, I was very well aware that the ideal innovation and creativity ecosystem is no longer one that is paper based, locked into closed institutional boundaries and that just the scientific and technical innovation is not enough to stay competitive on the global stage.

The prime ministers or heads of states of the 27 member states did acknowledge that “A key factor for future growth is the full development of the potential for innovation and creativity of European citizens built on European culture and excellence in science.” and

“At the same time further efforts must be made, including in the private sector, with a view to investing more, and more effectively, in research, creativity, innovation and higher education and achieving the 3% R&D investment target.“

and also:

“Providing high?quality education and investing more and more effectively in human capital and creativity throughout people’s lives are crucial conditions for Europe’s success in a globalised world.”

Explicitly mentioning the creative industries was beyond the vision of those who were negotiating the text that would be acceptable to all 27 member states. But frankly, the creative industries, just like the R&D sector is the one that is providing the added value. The latter creating the functional excellence of a product or service, the former its meaning.

The primer ministers introduced the concept of free movement of knowledge:

“Member States and the EU must remove barriers to the free movement of knowledge by creating a “fifth freedom” based on enhancing the cross-border mobility of researchers, as well as students, scientists, and university teaching staff, making the labor market for European researchers more open and competitive”

It is the free movement of the entire creative class that can make sure that in Europe we can put the best person to the job. Each individual member state is too small a market for the highly skilled and their movement is hampered through all kinds of obstacles. But the phrasing “cross-border mobility of the creative class” or “talents” did not pass under the bar. Member states do have a broader vision. For example, the discussion paper of the UK government “Realizing Britain’s Potential: Future Strategic Challenges for Britain” has a subtitle “Unlocking Talent“.

The 5^th freedom, as originally proposed by the (incidentally) Slovenian commissioner for Research dr. Poto?nik, was understood as movement of knowledgeable people. But the free movement of knowledge can mean so much more. The European leaders added

“facilitating and promoting the optimal use of intellectual property created in public research organisations so as to increase knowledge transfer to industry, in particular through an “IP Charter” to be adopted before the end of the year and encouraging open access to knowledge and open innovation.“

The text provides a clear acknowledgement that creativity and innovation are no longer locked into some closed institutional frameworks. Moreover, to bring the masses into the creative processes they need access to knowledge and the leaders stated very clearly “encouraging open access to knowledge and open innovation“. This is the language that the top EU political elite would use for Web 2.0 participatory innovation and the open access movement.

Last but not least the European leaders agreed with the Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janšathat communication infrastructures, the high speed internet, is an essential infrastructure where innovation and creativity take place today. European leaders are calling for every European school to be connected to high speed internet by 2010. And for an increasing percentage of the citizens to have high speed access.

The vessel I wrote about in the beginning is big. Quick turns are not possible. In the EU context one is not seeking the highest but rather the lowest common denominator. Nevertheless, the messages are there. They are the right messages. But the member states, regions, cities and companies would do well if they would take these ideas further. And member states, not all 27, but smaller groups could get together and proceed with different speeds on different issues.

Disclaimer: This is a personal view of the author and not an official position of the Slovenian government or its minister.

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, international research organisations, research bodies, libraries and other public organisations, as well as of scientific publishers, to the scientific dissemination process;

It is years late in recognising

that new, Internet-based dissemination models have triggered a major debate involving all concerned stakeholders on access to and dissemination of scientific information and in particular on access to peer-reviewed scientific articles” and that “over the past years scientific libraries’ capacity to provide researchers with access to a wide range of publications has been affected by rising overall prices of scientific journals (including electronic distribution of publications).

The Coucil underlines

the importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being available on the Internet at no cost to the reader under economically viable circumstances, including delayed open access;

Why just no cost to the reader. Why only delayed open access. This section should underline “the importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being available on the Internet at no cost under economically viable circumstances, including open access”.

There is a recognition that the process is not transparent and public funds are used inefficiently:

increasing the transparency of the contractual terms of “big deals”, and exploring the possibilities for funding bodies, research institutions and scientific publishers from different Member States to work together in order to achieve economies of scale and efficient use of public funds by demand aggregation.

Rather than making a clear statement that results of EU funded research should be published using open access paradigm, the suggestion to the commission is quite watered down:

experiment with open access to scientific data and publications resulting from projects funded by the EU Research Framework Programmes in order to assess the appropriateness of adopting specific contractual requirements;

Experiment … in order to assess the appropriateness of adopting specific contractual requirements. Now this is a good example of the Brussels parlance!

The document invites member states to:

assessing in a systematic way conditions affecting access to scientific information, including:

• the way in which researchers exercise their copyrights on scientific articles;
• the level of investments in the dissemination of scientific information as compared to total investments in research;
• the use of financial mechanisms to improve access, such as refunding VAT for digital journal subscriptions to libraries;

Indeed the first two points make sense, however, the idea to lift VAT for digital journals is the wrong message. If we mean open access, if we mean free, there is no VAT. Refunding VAT means simply subsidizing commercial publishers!

In all, its good to see the Council take interest in open access publishing. However, one can clearly feel that someone managed to dilute a potentially powerful documents. As it stands it hardly brings anything new. Most of the other actions suggested, such as “debating”, “experimenting”, “exploring”, “bringing together stakeholders” are either long overdue or have been done already.

In the context of the Lisbon strategy that should be driving Europe towards a knowledge based economy, one should note that the explosion of the internet based technologies in the US have been made possible by the (1) open access to software, (2) open standards and (3) freely available scientific articles on the subject. The cited document brings nothing like that to Europe.

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 communicating I hope to contribute to a better understanding of EU policies.

I am writing this blog myself, in person, without consultation with the PR office, without clearance from offical spokespersons. This blog is not providing an official view of the EU, or of the government of Slovenia. It is personal, but about public issues:

• Lisbon strategy.
• Sustainable development strategy.
• Energy and climate change.
• Any other business.