On the 27th of March the Greens have their third Document Freedom Day in the European Parliament. There will be a conference with two different panels.

In the second panel Amelia is the chair and the topic is "Open standards for critical digital infrastructure".

Read more about the conference here and register for the event here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91aGXAQIKak

This week is especially busy and international, even transoceanic. On Monday, Amelia will be in Toronto, speaking at the Cyber Dialogue Conference organised by the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs in University of Toronto. She will be back on Tuesday and she will go directly to the parliament from the airport for the ITRE votes.

Monday Whole day at the Cyber Dialogue Conference in Toronto

Tuesday 09:00 – 12:30 ITRE votes
13:00 – 14:30 Event on “Anti-Money Laundering and Data Protection: compatible challenges for the EU financial industry?”
15:30 – 16:30 ITRE meeting with the presence of Neelly Kroes

Wednesday 08:00 – 09:00 SME Intergroup: Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe
09:00 – 12:30 INTA meeting
12:30 – 15:00 Industrial Policy Roundtable: SMEs
15:00 – 15:30 Interview for a thesis on hacktivism
09:00 – 12:30 Interview for a paper on the music industry and the impact of online
19:00 – 19:30 Talk about CETA with students from the University of Ghent

Thursday 09:00 – 12:30 INTA meeting
15:00 – 18:30 INTA meeting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FVF8U3cRjSA

As you might know the entire European parliament (and council and commission) are stuck with Microsoft products for all clients. We have Linux for servers and such that the tech people tinker with, but us regular office drones have the pleasure of everyday being greeted by the Microsoft logo. The majority here in the parliament are stuck with Windows XP as their daily software diet. But not us, we have been upgraded! We had the fortune of being picked to be part of the testing group for windows 7. And here's my review of the experience so far.

Overall impression
So what's the big difference for a user when you log in? Desktop looks more or less the same, things function more or less the same as before. Nothing much has actually changed from the XP experience. Only difference is that the programs that comes with the package has been upgraded. Perhaps the start-up time is slightly shorter, but if so it is a marginal difference.

Web browser
This is probably the biggest change. In the XP environment of old we were all stuck with Internet Explorer and not allowed to add other browsers to the computer. But now in our new Windows 7 home we got Firefox installed from start. Personally I circumvented the old lock-in to IE by using Firefox portable, but now I can have the full foxed out browsing experience without any hassle. So a huge plus for this.

With help from the Italian Pirate Party, now the IPRED Consultation model response sheet is available in Italian. You can find it in Italian on this Google Doc-page, or as a .pdf here on this site.

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. Also ensure that you check your spam inbox - the manually transmitted consultation links may well end up there!

The deadline for answering is March 30th, so there is no reason to delay in requesting your survey link.

If you speak a language different than Italian, you can also find more model response guides in this post here on the site (Swedish, English, Spanish, German, Polish).