Fellow-Pirate and newest intern at Amelia’s office (Hello world, nice meeting you!) reporting on Hannover weekend.

On Sunday the 20st of January there were the local state parliament elections in Lower Saxony, Germany. Aim:  5% of votes in order to get a parliament seat. Stake: entering the federal parliament in the next national election in September.

The local Pirate Party called in international troops to help out during the last day of campaigning in the run up to the final voting day on Sunday. Belgians, Czechs, Swedes, Dutch and Germans gathered in the cold Hannover for the weekend to discuss, share ideas, campaign and socialize.

Cozily gathered at the Pirate Headquarters, the weekend workshop started with an introductory welcoming briefing by host Justus Römeth of Pirate Party Niedersachsen. Next to coffee and muffins we also enjoyed the cleverly designed promotional material alongside a brief presentation on the past campaigning weeks.  Skilfully organized, the Germans are skilfully organized. They have eye-catching posters, billboards, various insightful leaflets structured by topic and purpose, and sword-shaped orange balloons.

This week Amelia and the rest of the office will be busy with several events about data protection,  online identification and cloud computing, as well as committee meetings. You can see all the highlights of the week here:

The data protection reform in the European Parliament is taking unexpected turns. After 20 years of studies, academic research, European research projects, evaluation by national data protection authorities and their collaboration organisations, and more money spent on proper, impact-assessed and evidence based policy making, the Commission put forth an interesting proposal in January of 2012 to update the data protection of the European citizen. However, it appears that the regulatory process is hijacked by a few corporate actors who are targeting the European institution of weakest means to defend itself against the onslaught: the Parliament. But it doesn't even end there....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ObkxeItmk

If you missed it season 3 of #exile6e has started and there is soon to be another episode released. While we are working on episode 2 you can watch the season starter!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jg-WvJH_U4

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On the 30 of november the commission opened a IPRED-questionnaire. To make it easier for citizens to respond to this questions, we here at my office have prepared a preliminary response guide. It will make it easier to understand when and why you should leave a response to the questions. It's however pretty general in its nature, as the commission almost always dismisses answers that are exactly the same.

You can find the survey here: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/consultations/2012/intellectual-property-rights_en.htm

To participate in the survey, you must request a consultation link to be sent to you by email. This is done by providing your email to the Commission, they will then manually send the link to the survey to you. This means that you only can get a participation link during normal office hours. During the next week we will request many participation links, so it will be easier to get a link during the Christmas and New Years leave.

For general information about consultations refer to the text at the bottom of this article.