Something important happened this week; something, that empowers the people. And no, I’m not writing about the new pope, I’m writing about the European Parliament, who has rejected the draft budget of the EU. It was probably the first time that it was not a single country blocking the negotiations of all other countries, either with a referendum or a stubborn government. To me it always seemed to be rather unfair that a minority is able to govern the rest of Europe, while the European Parliament, being the only elected institution of the EU, had almost no power. With the “No” to the budget, the European people may be confident of getting an important voice in the future.
Currently we’re working on the website of our panel, trying to enhance the functionality, making it easier for our members to engage with research projects and therefore more likely to participate in surveys. We had a lot of extensive meetings during the last weeks, collected a lot of brilliant ideas in exhausting brainstorming-sessions. It will be great advance, we’re sure. We’re so convinced of our ideas that we don’t need to ask the people. We know what works!
Well, admittedly, we don’t! Therefore we conducted a study within our panel to find out, how we can improve. We had some good ideas ourselves, but not all of them could convince our panelists and therefore had to be dropped or modified. Some ideas were good, but our panelists helped us to make them even better. And some ideas came from the respondents themselves, knowing the panel from a different perspective than we (and it is probably from the only perspective that really counts).
It is important to mention, that we didn’t wait until the launch of our new website. Our study was not meant to be the evaluation of a definite solution; the contrary is true. It was a first input for our team, before starting to develop something and spending hours on coding worthless gadgets. And we are planning to keep in touch with our panelists during the development process. It is easier to modify a concept when the paint is still wet, rather than when the whole piece is concluded and has become some kind of awkward reality. And I think that’s exactly what Europe is learning at the moment.
We’ll see what next week brings. Happy weekend!
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