Most Hungarians believe the European Parliament is actually a huge beer pump in Brussels loaded with money and MEPs are international wrestlers in suits fighting to get more of it. Hungarian journalist and former collegue of mine, Balint Szlanko published a great insider manual on how this pump actually works, but most Hungarians don't really read nonfiction in fact.     

A new European parliament is soon to be elected, and it seems to have an influence on this season's tech conferences as well. The EP needs to cope with the societal, economic and technological changes we all are riding - says user experience designer Nadia El-Imam to Kultplay. Nadia initiated a discussion at Reboot, a forth coming web conference located in Copenhagen, Denmark. This meet up is a gathering for "programmers, designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, bloggers, and activists". The program here isn't set up by curators. Anyone can suggest topics and workshops, the community will vote for the best ideas to discuss.

The EC is launching a series of workshops for the tech literate to help design guidelines for policy making that will then be submitted to the new MEPs. Nadia and the Reboot community want to produce a set of best practice guidelines for the new members of the European parliament. "We think these guidelines will contribute towards better policy-making especially where Information and communication technology is concerned" - she added.

They think a good place to start is by identifying the most important techno-social trends and their effects on issues like societal governance, privacy and identity management.
What do they think will come out of this effort? For now let´s say it starts with inspiring policy makers to ask the right questions when shaping European research and policy agenda for ICT.                            

Nadia and her collaborators think the EP election is a little more than sending a new team of corporate lobbyists to Brussels. They believe as European citizens we can write the guidelines to our common future by suggesting a rational interenet policy to the MEPs. Europe after all isn't very famous of hitting the right note when it comes to the issues of copyright, net neutrality, or file sharing. How do they think it should it work and what should it include? Join the conversation here, and meet Nadia at this years Reboot!