Summary: Margot Wahlstrom is an official of the governing commission of the European Union. She writes a weblog. (Here's a link to the government itself, (Note the front page statement on corporate responsibility). Her openness and accessibility could well be copied with good effect in the US.
Here's her most recent entry(click
here
for comments). Notice that her accessibility is not simply structural, via the presence of the weblog, but in her use of language and her sharing of personal feelings.
Gloomy days
I laugh a lot with my youngest son – which makes those long and dark days, that come now and then, bearable. Recently, however, he brought back my bad conscience (I think something that many working women feel) when he wrote for a school-project: “mother hardly does any housework – instead she reads heaps of paper” while his father is described as “doing everything at home”…
One of my friends, active in politics and married to a chef, went to a dinner and heard her youngest daughter comment: “what a strange house – the woman is in the kitchen!” We are comforted by our children’s love and affection. At least they see that the role of men and women in society can be changed!
Then came a dark day with many tsunami-obituaries in the Swedish papers: whole families lost, children with both parents dead, parents left with no children… So much grief and a new painful reality for so many people affected by this catastrophe.
Somebody wrote thought-provokingly: “At least and for once we actually know why it happened: a geographical phenomenon causing an earthquake which built a huge wave etc. – it is much more difficult to understand why somebody kills an old man to get 20 € , or any other meaningless violence in the streets, which causes suffering and deaths. It does not change the loss or the mourning but maybe the healing process is easier for something that did not involve human evil….”.
A commenter responds both supportively and with well-intended criticism..
Dear Commissioner Waldstrom,
It is commendable that the Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communications Strategy take the unprecedented step of making direct use of modern communication tools and I add my voice to those who congratulate you for this.
Nevertheless, I find it a pity that the comments logged on your blog so far have rather little to do with your portfolio: if today’s showing is representative, then your blog runs the risk of becoming a place for several endless debates already taking place elsewhere on the web (e.g. the pros and cons of the invasion of Iraq) to be cloned yet again.
Here we have a fine opportunity for Europe’s (and indeed the world’s) general public to interact directly with a European Commissioner. I should like to make use of that opportunity to talk about your communications portfolio.
The Barroso Commission has made a political statement of the first magnitude about the significance of the Union’s institutional communications by not only appointing a Commissioner, but making that Commissioner a Vice-President of the Commission. It is a fact that the European Institutions have communicated their message appallingly badly in the past, appealing to little more than vague sentimental ideas of continental unity and in the process smoothing the way for the Eurosceptics to have an easy time.
The longstanding presumption of the founding fathers was that all Europeans want to unite Europe so as to avoid a repetition of internecine warfare. But the generation of De Gasperi, Schumann and Adenauer has long been replaced by voters who have never experienced the hardship of war directly and so do not necessarily identify with that unity as an all-encompassing (and all-excusing) long-term goal. Unlike Jeremy Rifkin, many European citizens (including millions of enthusiastic pro-Europeans) witnessed the recent constitutional negotiation process as just another case of horse trading between jaded politicians, each pursuing domestic policy issues and ending up with a lowest common denominator document with a gloss of fine rhetoric over the top. Hardly a proactive impulse for the future.
We can discuss whether such a moment of Euroscepticism was the best time to launch a Constitution, but if we accept the basic premise that the decision was made, so we must make the best of it, then that document should take the form of a design brief, a blueprint for a better Europe for everyone. Let’s take the bull by the horns: if there is scepticism around, for example, then it is both foolish and democratically wrong to keep trying to vote it into oblivion (which actually means 49% minorities) using referenda: that method will neither make the problem go away, nor solve the rifts. On the contrary, the very voting process itself, while superficially democratic, may in practice generate many new rifts.
So maybe we need to design new ways of achieving public involvement that do not necessarily end up with the confrontational methods of the referendum. This is not to advocate the abandonment of voting as a means towards representative government, of course: on the contrary, there is a need to seek new ways of building consensus in diversity, which may be a civilised “agreement to disagree”, the recognition and full citizenship of scepticism and opposition.
What the European Institutions – and indeed the European message as a whole – require is that design brief for a better Europe. Not one where we squabble about our religious matrices, but one where we look to the future, ensuring that Europe will continue to be a place where there is plenty of room for dissent and scepticism. The application of design methodology to the definition of this brief and to the institutional communications that should derive from it is an essential step on the path to ensuring that all the people involved – the pros and the antis – come to feel a shared sense of belonging in future.
Europe has a very highly developed, qualified and advanced design community, whose skills range from the more celebrated and visible cases of architectural and product design to the no less essential but fare less notorious instances of communication and system design. Every object we use, every place we inhabit, everything we see or hear is designed (some of it better than the rest, to be sure), generating the principal social – and also economic – difference between our creativity-intensive society, with its focus on the quality of product and life, and the productivity-intensive society of the Far East. And yet design is still practically only quoted by the institutions as though it were a fashion accessory, although our design community has cutting edge exponents of research and practice, theory and education, social and economic implications.
The expertise to enable the European institutions set about really defining the brief for the Europe of tomorrow and then creating and fine-tuning the communications process is ready and waiting. On the other hand, the European institutions have a very real (and now, with your appointment, authoritatively acknowledged) need to improve both the message and how it is communicated. It looks to me as though there is an obvious bridge just crying out to be built here.
There were dozens of comments. My take on them: helpful and hopeful.
