Yeah, good morning everybody.
It's a great pleasure obviously, I mean seeing you all here, I think it's the biggest group
we ever worked with in the agency.
It's 92 of you, I think 90 people made it so far, so we're only missing two.
And some of them, some of you we've met in the first round of blogging on the European
Parliament elections, there's about a dozen of you who've been with us for that first
round, now the second round, there's a lot of new people, a lot of new faces here.
We feel very honored and privileged really to have such a nice group of people, it will
be very exciting and we have three months time to focus on climate change, on issues,
on debate, on discussions and also on hopefully some fun.
I know everybody of you has quite deep convictions, so I should really go the other way and say
listen to other people, also allow voices that are not as close to the issue as you
are and try to integrate as many outside opinions, points of view as possible, so that will make
you argument even more strong.
And maybe just a few words about European journalism center, since there were some questions last
night as well.
We are a Dutch non-profit organization based in Maastricht, we also have an office in Brussels
and we do a lot of media work, basically training journalists, networking journalists, networking
people like you and also do some capacity building in countries like Azerbaijan, Armenia,
Georgia, outside the EU and also we're looking into curriculum development, basically looking
into ideas of what journalists or people who occupy public space should be learning
to do a better job.
This has been going on for quite a while, we're doing well, we can also take risks obviously
and do things we've never done before, like having so many people in one room here and
just improvising as we go along.
It will be quite exciting, there's a lot of people here also from the EGC, so staff here,
everybody raise their hands for staff, there's quite a few.
So any questions you may have on technical issues, on issues of travel, lodging, how
to use the flip, everything like that, there will be ample support from staff here.
I would like to thank of course them because they've been behind all this and getting you
all here safely and also I would like to thank the European Commission or people from the
European Commission, we have sitting here in the first row actually and from DJ Com,
they have been supporting us on the first round and also we managed to convince them
to support us in the second round again and thank you very much for that, it's quite out
of the box for you as well I know, so I know you're also taking the risk there and it might
not be what you normally are set to do, so quite courageous there, thank you very much.
As we go along, I mean we have the whole day to spend, tomorrow we're going to make an
outing, I heard there's some over breakfast and I've heard there's some flash mob event
going on at about 6.30 or something, maybe somebody knows more about it, you can mention
it, so maybe that might be also a good occasion once we've finished here to do something else
still.
Raymond Franken will be helping us and will be showing you how to deal with the flip cameras
we've been giving out to everybody, it's very easy to do, even I can do it and I'm
a pretty idiot on technical matters, so enjoy the work with the camera as well, it is really
easy you should play with it a lot and the outcome is very good, or can be very good,
so it's down to you obviously how you make it, but it's a very simple tool that would
have cost probably under €50,000 or €10 years ago, so the scalability of it is quite
good.
So what else do I say, I don't really know, have fun, okay?
