The 24th official language of the EU: Eurocratese

According to their website the EU, that beacon of multilingualism has 23 official languages,

They are: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish.

But now we have to add a 24th. To work and operate in the institutions it has long been known that you need English to succeed, and French to brown nose. But the key language skill above all others is to be fluent in that amalgam of English and gibberish, Eurocratese. Thanks to Quarsan I can bring you this text book example.

Without a close study of the following texts you can forget passing the Concours. First an intro flowchart.

16:00-18:00 1st Break-out session: Visions

This session will take the form of a brainstorming structured into six groups corresponding to the six thematic dimensions of the Digital Futures "hexagon" (political, social, economic, personal, environmental and technological). It will perform a stocktaking of existing "visions" (including those stemming from the DG INFSO internal trial or brought by the participants) and cross-fertilise opinions, inspiring ideas for further visions.

Got that? There will be questions...

9:00-11:00 2nd Break-out session: Trends

The trends identified at the plenary session will have been clustered and the clusters will be partitioned amongst the break-out sessions. Participants will revise the trends, possibly adding new ones. Each trend should then be scored with regards to certainty and impact and receive a fading-out date (if any).

Of course comprehension is vital (if any).

There is, of course method,

Methodology

The long term time horizon of Digital Futures makes it suitable for normative methods (i.e. that start with a preliminary set of futures that are of particular interest and work backwards to see if and how these futures might or might not grow out of the present) complemented by explorative methods (i.e. that begin with the present). The approach is conceptually divided into three knowledge elicitation steps:

1) Draw scenarios on a time horizon 2040-50 using participative scenario planning/thinking techniques. Each scenario is associated with a likelihood, desirability and impact.

2) Identify possible issues stemming from the scenarios, including risks and opportunities.

3) Proceed backward to devise policy orientations and options for action to address the above issues.

To facilitate the planning of scenarios the project identifies trends and the associated drivers and inhibitors with a long term time perspective.

Each of the steps is underpinned by a number of techniques such as creative brainstorming, gaming, relevance trees, Delphi and formal modelling.

And like all the best things, there is another flow chart (if any)

This is for planning for the future, 30 to 40 years in the future.

 Please remember, we are paying for this.

I have nominated this for the Golden Bull award