Hello again everyone, so you've heard from the politicians, you've heard from the people
who are making the decisions and now you're going to hear for the people who work for them.
So in the room today we have the wonderful Sebastian Rebler, formerly the assistant to
MEP Sergei Lagerdinsky, we have Jul Ovory, who is the current assistant to marketer
and we have myself, Jordan Maris, formerly assistant to Karen Melkeur and so presently Sebastian's
working with a pal, the open source business association and I'm working with the open source
initiative. So we'll just let people come in. We're going to talk to you today about like
how you can make the change happen, who you need to talk to, who you need to contact, what you
need to do if you see something that you don't like or if you just want to watch what's
going on and maybe chime in. So it's going to start with me and I don't know if you guys know
the meme of the conspiracy fairy man with like the you know yeah well it's going to be a bit
like that because I'm about to explain to you how the EU makes laws in as quick a time as possible.
So how we make laws and how you can influence them. Well they have to start somewhere they start
almost always with the European Commission. So the European Commission it's like the government
of the EU and it's the only bought body of the EU which can propose laws. Now they get the ideas
from these laws from lots of different places. There's the parliament so parliament can write what's
like essentially an own initiative report and they'll say we want you to do this, the Commission
then have to answer we're not doing this for this reason or we're doing this because it's a good
idea. They can come from citizens so there's something called the European Citizens Initiative
which I'll talk to you in a bit more detail about later. They can also come from the
governments of EU countries and finally the Commission can also come up with ideas for them
of their own which they are regularly do. Now what then happens is they start to prepare a law right
so they add it to what they're thinking they work program they have one a year it's essentially
the list of all the things they are going to do. Once they've done that they have to do a bunch of
stuff. First thing, stakeholder consultations. Now you may not know this but you are in fact
stakeholders. Everybody in this room is a stakeholder and everybody can actually participate in
that process. I'll explain a little more in depth in a minute. They also have to do research and
evaluations of the laws that we already have on the books and an impact assessment to see how the law
will affect citizens but where you can have the most impact I'd say is here, here and here.
So the European Citizens Initiative is the first way you can do things but it's also quite difficult
you need to get a total of 1 million signatures from around the European Union it's a lot of signatures
and there are minimum thresholds for each country depending on how many people there are in the country.
It also needs organizers from 7 EU countries which is sometimes a bit of a challenge
so to be very frank it's not good for niche issues so unless you have something which is going to
capture the attention of 1 in 500 Europeans it might not be the best way but the good news is there are
other ways you can directly petition the European Parliament you can go on the website and send a
petition there's a committee dedicated to looking at those petitions and making suggestions but the best ways
to do things is to get your idea into a Parliament report so in an initiative report by Parliament
now you can look on the Parliament's website to see what is being worked on and if you see
something that sounds like something that's interesting for example right now there is digital fairness
act and I am personally invested in making sure that we get rid of DRM in printed cartridges
so I've just decided to respond to that so you can you can you can speak to any piece you can
reach out to them and we'll learn more how to do that in a minute and ask about that there's also
that have your sayportals so this is the stakeholder thing right anybody can go on this website
and all of the laws are in the works you have the possibility to send your feedback to and I know
because I work with people from the commission all the time that they actually take this feedback
very seriously so it is worth writing feedback on OSI and appell regularly do so so yeah you should
too yeah I'm sorry this is a horrible thing and this is where I start to look like a conspiracy
Ferris but I want to very very quickly go through the process with you so once the commission
have written their law they're proposal for a law they're going they're going to send it off to
two different institutions says the Parliament and there's the council we're not going to talk
about the council because they're more difficult to influence but we are going to talk about the
Parliament because that's also our area of expertise so when it gets to Parliament we distribute it
and it works a bit like get actually so you're going to have your branch in the council it's
going to be distributed to the Parliament and it would be distributed to one or multiple committees
groups of Parliament MPs like Marquette who are working on a specific subject
then there's going to be people chosen to be in charge of it now we call them the
rapporteur and the shadow rapporteurs the rapporteurs one MP from one group and there will be
shadow rapporteurs from all of the other political groups so you know it might be it might be a
social democrat who's in charge but you can also reach out to the other MPs who are in charge
this information is on the Parliament's website then there's the presentation so you can watch
these presentations online and essentially it's a room full of MPs working on the topic and the
law will be presented by the guy or woman or person who's in charge of the law after the
presentation there'll be a delay for MPs to submit changes or amendments to the law and after
that the rapporteur who's in charge will have to take a look at all of those things and then
Julie discard them and ignore them to pick their own things but that's not the end of the story
because then the negotiations begin and everything is up for grabs during this time you can
reach out to MPs and ask them to submit amendments you can talk to them about problems that's
what they're here for so you just have to work out who to reach out to now the negotiations are
complicated but essentially there are two parts there's the parts where the MPs are negotiating
and the parts where as lowly assistance are negotiating and essentially we go back and forth
like this until we come to an agreement where the MPs are okay with what we've come up with and
when we can't agree we leave it to the MPs to work it out amongst themselves once we have a agreement
the committee votes on what they've done and then it goes off to be voted on in the whole Parliament
and that's a whole other story which we're not going to tell today oh apparently we are going to tell
it today sometimes this happens yeah and then so last step when it goes off to be voted on by the
full Parliament even if everything has gone horribly wrong up until here and you haven't managed
to get your voice heard in plenary so that's when all of the MPs are in one room voting on a
topic there is still a chance to fix things and it happens quite regularly and it's quite dramatic
it was my favorite part of the job so you have an opportunity to ask MPs to submit amendments to
the laws which will be voted on in plenary and you can change it at the last minute in fix things
it's harder but it is also possible and it happens quite regularly once it's been adopted
we then have to go back and negotiate with the council but again that in fact is a story
for another day so yeah recap where can you influence the process the have your say portal which
we will link to somewhere probably at the end of the presentation MPs the ones that you need to
reach out to and write amendments the repertoire when he's writing his report during negotiations
towards the end and finally during the plenary if you haven't managed up until then and now I'm
going to hand over to anybody Sebastian you want to start to talk about following the law making
process how you can keep up on things all right that's a bit unexpected I was going to
extend upon a bit what you said before about how to how to lobby the council and that it's so
so hard but a lot of people that I see here I've seen your faces before a lot of you are already
invested and a lot of you are talking with people that are already invested or that are activists
on the on the regional local or national level and I think that's the the easiest way to
to influence the council by already to talk by talking to the context that you already have
in national governments so the council is a bit obscure also to people who have worked in the
parliament for a long time but it's it's not impossible to do it I think it's it's most important
to keep up with the with the discussions and if you have a ask if you have a topic that you
want to introduce into European law making to not stay alone with it there are occasionally
the cases where submitting something to the Petitions Committee or trying to build a
citizen's initiative might work out without connecting to a lot of movements and to a lot of
other people or writing an email to an individual and parliament but that does not connect your
ask to a bigger story and that's what a politician will usually be looking for or what also the
commission will be looking for does a demand connect with something that is really important to
society when it comes to the politicians they have to find things that they can talk to voters about
right to to be elected to continue having their job so so make sure that you try and connect with
narratives in the previous session we were talking about how do we bring open source awareness to
the EU well we try to do that but I work for business associations so the narrative for us is
competitiveness now recently the vice president of the commission had a technological sovereignty
added to her title so speak about how your project contributes to that technological sovereignty
following the the process keep up with the news try to connect with other people find community
and don't be encouraged and especially if you do feel encouraged from time to time
with time being tough for most of us these days do find community that's what I really
would suggest yeah would actually agree to that I think the open source community is the best for
organizing itself in finding a lot of people working on the same topic or on the same project
and imagine this as a project basically so if you want to influence a low as he as he mentioned
you have several steps in which you can intervene you can follow that on the parliament's website
especially the the single A which is the the if you like yeah which is the parliament's website
where you can find actually what he mentioned like the shadows the the rapporteur the people
are working on the topic or on the specific file when you're trying to reach out to an MEP the best
you can do is actually be timely that that's all very obvious but when we're working on the file
for us the critical part is before we submit the amendments so if you come before that that's the
best possible option for us because then that means that from the very beginning we mentioned that
topic and that topic will be all in on the negotiations brought up back again and again from us
yes you can see like for any lore if you go on this website and scroll down
sorry for any lore if you go on this website and scroll down you can see who's in charge of it
who's the rapporteur yeah oh there's a strong percussion from over there and you can also see
who else you can reach out to on the process and yeah so and so so it's really useful to know
who you need to contact if you click on any of the profiles let's let's get another reaction
why do you have links to email social media and ever or else where you can reach the
past name question yeah and I was actually my second thing to be very targeted because when you're
working on a very specific topic they are just a few members of the repaint parlaments that are
working on the topic so don't reach out to all of them because most of them won't care anyway but
the the critical ones in each political group you will kind of find them by finding the critical
fights on that topic and you will see they will be always shadow rapporteur or rapporteur on
this topic and then you reach out to them and they will be the ones dealing with it most probably
I thought the next one was titled chasing the MEPs because do keep being friendly
but if you if you have sent an email to an office for example do try and follow up within one or two
days give them a phone call don't be discouraged if they don't have time for you that moment
try again if you can it's always good to try and follow up with an email because literally
we received so many emails they they just fall under how do you say under the table changing views
who's taking that so I'm a little nervous now because I have two MEPs in the room and I'm
going to do some psychoanalysis of MEPs so sorry sorry in advance guys now when it comes to changing
MEPs views my the most important thing I can say to you is find something that they've already said
and say it back to them sorry sorry so so like if you if you take first of all take a look at
what they're interested like if you have a specific MEP you know you can see the laws they've
worked on in the past you can see also who they've spoken to because we we do that transparency
transparently in the EU so you can see which lobbyists have got to them before you but what I'd
really recommend is look at what they've been saying look at their views check their social media
see okay you know what drives this person and work out how you can sell them your thing on the basis
of that that's really important part of it when it's possible now obviously in some cases it's not
possible but most of the time there is an argument for open source no matter which political side
you're on you know like the argument with Axel Voss who you just saw on screen will be a
competitiveness argument it will be saving money from saving public money argument you might not
have the same argument on the other side of the spectrum you might have arguments about equity
and access and transparency so you know kind of tailored to your audience but another really
important thing that okay doesn't apply to the MEPs in this room but but another really
important thing is that when the process starts when we start making a law we actually don't
know where the middle ground is going to be so what you have to understand is that with with a
few exceptions pointing to them now most of the MEPs in parliament are not really specialists in
one subject so they might be working on a law where they're relying on a lot of people like you
and also a lot of people who work in industry to come and give them input and their job is to
work out where the middle actually is where what is the best thing for society so let's say you're
writing a letter to an MEP about let's say I don't know if you guys know chat control it's an
EU law about monitoring our communications you go at it from a privacy perspective and you write an
email which is very strong on privacy you the way that you will be considered by the MEPs okay this
person is an activist and that's not a bad thing but it moves the middle a little bit less so depending
on the arguments you're going to make you have to pick what you want to say so the chat control
example one of the things you could say as well this law is actually going to generate more
false positives for law enforcement so it's actually going to make it harder and that's like a
middle ground argument and if you say that and you you can talk about privacy but if you talk
about that more then you rebalance the thing and the middle ground moves more in your direction
right because suddenly they're thinking okay this person's not just here to talk about privacy
they also actually want this law to work and so you you know you have the opportunity to be
listened to a bit more so my recommendation would be when you write to MEPs tell you your letter
consider your topic but consider things around it the MEP might be open to what interested in
as well that I'm handing everything to you to say something I don't know what you know as we said
the beginning I think see that as a project and there are a lot of people in that room that
we are already working on the EU as such more than open source or both of them so you can also
reach out to these people like you have organizations working on these topics who can actually
represent you here and who to whom we talk to on a regular basis with with market I especially
so you're not alone in this and if you feel a bit of a one and you just want to come
with one specific opinion you can also reach out to them or reach out to other people who you
know will have the expertise to bring you to the person to who you should talk to.
Well last thing from my side if I may I know times up but there is a lot of activity happening
here in Brussels there are organizations that already know how this thing works so if you don't yet
or if you feel like you have a question then reach out to who's ever closest to you specifically
in the room is the free software foundation Europe for example I want point to people
anymore there is open for a Europe that I'm not pointing to and there is a European digital
rights for example that you couldn't connect to and they are maybe certain parties that you
want to connect to that I'm not pointing to. Well that's it thank you very much guys and
yeah that was really lovely hope it's been useful so next on the agenda I think we have
Toby Toby oh yes sorry
offer an alternative for instance chat control is a really great example
because it's very nice to say this is bad for privacy or it won't work because it will
produce false positives but still in most of the MEP's minds what is back of their minds is
but this is about protecting children so I really need to do something and when they are
puzzled they don't know what to do maybe they decide to vote in favor of this chat control provision
because it's at least something so I think an important part of it is to offer an alternative
solution and say oh maybe then we need a better access for law enforcement targeted to individuals who
are suspected from sharing child sexual abuse material implemented in the law instead of chat control
that will work much better and then maybe they will say oh wow that that's a good idea let's
let's try to find a look into it a bit let's try to look into it a bit more
goodness that it better myself thank you very much Vasel