MY-WAY is a project that was launched in January 2015 with the aim to enhance and improve the collaboration and efforts of web entrepreneurship initiatives. We wanted to know more about the project and what is exactly happening, so we asked Pablo Hernández, External Relations Director of AEGEE-Europe, and Ioana Duca, Project Officer of the MY-WAY project, some questions.

The AEGEEan: Can you tell us a little bit about the project? 
Ioana: The MY-WAY project is a two year project, funded by Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The project started in January 2015 and its aim is to improve the collaboration and efforts of web entrepreneurship initiatives (startup hubs, accelerator networks, etc.), internet and business experts (accelerators, mentors, etc.), educational actors (business teachers and trainers) and young adults as the final beneficiaries (through student networks, student entrepreneurship initiatives, etc.). I’m the Project Officer of MY-WAY project and responsible for two stakeholders meetings. The first one took place on the 12th of November and the second one will be in the last week of January (the date is still under discussion). My current position gives me all the logistical responsibilities for the events and some content responsibilities.

As you already mentioned, the first stakeholders meeting took place on the 12th of November. How did it go?
Ioana: Yes, we had our first stakeholders meeting on the 12th of November in the European Parliament, hosted by MEP Brando Benifei, Committee on Employment and Social Affairs. The aim of this event was to bring together successful web entrepreneurs, business teachers, trainers, members of student networks, student enterprise centers, and actors managing initiatives and programs on web entrepreneurship and to encourage active discussions between participants on effective ways of providing support while also establishing further cooperations. We had 25 participants in person and 25 participants online, plus even more people following the event online. At some point we had around 154 people watching the streaming.
Pablo: Everything went very well. The event gathered people from very different backgrounds and different roles in the web-entrepreneurship world so they could exchange experiences and good practices. The European Parliament is the perfect place to host this kind of activities, giving us the space, the visibility and the opportunity to address a member of the European Parliament. We also had the opportunity to have a keynote speech by Mr. Gonçalo Lobo Xabier and the intervention of many other relevant people trying to improve the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

MY-WAY is not an AEGEE project, but AEGEE is a partner in it. How does your experience in AEGEE helps you work for this project?
Pablo: The role of AEGEE within the project is to bring the youth and student perspective into the project. We are the main target group and possible beneficiaries of the outcomes of the project so my experience in AEGEE helps me giving the input from the students point of view at the different stages of the project. There are other tasks in which we also have to have a guiding role and for those, like the organisation of the stakeholders meetings, my previous experience in AEGEE is crucial, because I can put into practice what I did by organising some activities in the past.
Ioana: I think my experience in AEGEE helped me a lot. The experience that I gained in these five years and a half is very hard to be described in words, but I can say that it made me the person that I am today. All the events that I organised (around six Summer Universities, plus other local events), all the experience being in the board of my local (Secretary, President and SU Coordinator), plus all the responsabilities in European Bodies (as CD assistant twice and Comité Directeur) gave me a lot of knowledge. They even changed me, and moreover all these gave me the chance to experience everything that I know and learned and even more, to be challenged and to learn more, to discover more. Being a volunteer is definitely not a waste of time and energy. Being an active AEGEE member is never boring and for nothing, it is for you and the person that you want to become, it is for a life full of challenges and experiences.

Can members from AEGEE locals be part and get actively involved in the project?
Pablo: There are some ways to actively get involved. Some months ago we had to research the actual state of web-entrepreneurship and we launched a survey across the network. From now on there will be some events organized by the partners of the consortium for young people and in some cases, we can reserve a place to AEGEE members. But now the main involvement that we as AEGEEans can have is to create a platform to debate and organize activities related to web entrepreneurship following up on the results of the project. The Comité Directeur is willing to help the members in this process and support all this kind of initiatives.

What are your plans in the near future regarding the project?
Pablo Hernandez: My plans regarding the MY-WAY project are mainly to organise the second stakeholders meeting, which will consume a lot of our time. There are other activities that involve us in the project too, like the partners meeting, attending some conferences to bring the youth perspective into play, writing reports of our tasks and disseminating the results of the project, which will finish by the end of 2016.

How do you see the project in five years?
Ioana: Hopefully there will be a continuity, maybe a second phase of the project if the consortium decides to apply with another project to give continuity to what we already worked on. But even if this will not happen, I think the results will give the chance to still be able to work on the topic and will create some bridges and long term collaborations between stakeholders.

You can follow the project on Facebook or the website.

Written by Raluca Radu, AEGEE-Cluj-Napoca

Do terms like Internet Governance, Data Protection, Mass Surveillance, Edward Snowden and Intellectual Property Rights sound like the recipe of an event for internet nerds who normally don’t manage to see the sun and live behind their computer? Maybe, but this event turned out to be not like this at all. During the New Media Summer School 2014 in Berlin, 34 young participants from all over Europe and from a variety of different organizations met to learn more about this weird thing called internet and how to control it.

Internet Governance is clearly more and more in the focus of many young people, international policy makers and of course international organisations such as AEGEE. That’s why the questions around NSA, Snowden, Facebook and Google selling private data, liquid democracy and many others are important and more and more discussed. Therefore, young people need to gain knowledge about how to handle and be involved in these topics. Together, organisations like Internet Governance Forum, JEF, Young Pirates, Wikimedia Berlin, AEGEE-Berlin, Collab Berlin and many others organised the New Media Summer School (NMSS), which was a five day training taking place in Berlin. The days were filled with brainstorming, discussions and workshops on topics of internet security, protection of your personal data and the dilemma of intellectual property rights.

Since 2011, one of the aims of the NMSS is to prepare the participants to be “active” in the European Dialoque on Internet Governance (EuroDIG). This event lasted two days and consisted of a series of conferences, workshops and flash sessions, where people could exchange ideas and reflections with the possibility to be directly involved in European projects related on different topics of the Internet Governance (data protection, privacy, net neutrality, copyright, big data. etc.). All together trying to contribute to a constructive dialogue.

An interesting flash session was the session about the Global Internet Policy Observator (GIPO), a very recent project that needs people and organizations to contribute. In detail, the project is lead by the European Commission and its aim is to provide technical tools to support internet policy and governance, making information easily and widely accessible in order to enable a more inclusive participation of all stakeholders. This project is encouraged by the IGF (the most important Internet Governance Forum at a worldwide level). Now the project is under prototypization, but nevertheless, different stakeholders from all over the world are interested to be involved in creating a GIPO community.

This is only one of the many projects related to the Internet Governance field, where different stakeholder try to discuss together, finding the best solution to develop and/or improve the existing policy, thanks to this “wide dialogue”. Participants had the chance to have experts on their respective field talk about the anatomy of the internet, internet governance, self governance, net neutrality, copyrights, human rights, the Snowden revelation, privacy, mass surveillance, data protection, anonymity, the future of the internet and several other terms that at first sounded unfamiliar to many of us but as days passed became part of our vocabulary. During the preparatory events the participants aquired some valuable information about the issues that would be discussed during the conference and exchanged knowledge and ideas with other participants, professionals and organizers. Through the conference participants were given the chance to actively participate in the ongoing dialogue that was taking place in the plenaries, workshops and flash presentations.

The most important element of the EuroDIG was the dicotomy where everyone was both a producer and recipient of thoughts, ideas, arguments and messages. In this conference you could both influence the people around you but also be influenced by them. It was the interactiveness that made the EuroDIG successful and productive, as the issues under discussion were approached by a lot of different viewpoints. During the conference, participants from all sort of different backgrounds had the chance to meet each other and communicate as equals. During lunch being approached by academic professors, young entrepreneurs, businessmen, policy makers, tech people etc. was the norm. There was no sense that certain people’s opinion mattered more and participants were actually interested in hearing what you had to say no matter who you were or what was your background. During the plenaries issues that were raised in the tweets posted on the twitterwall were addressed and not disregarded as trivial.

The organisers from AEGEE Berlin and collaboratory were nothing but enthusiastic, helpful, patient and understanding, especially during the days when the heat in Berlin was just too much. The New Media Summer school was an overall interesting and thought provoking event that had a lot to offer to those who took part in it. It is an ongoing event as it is the dialogue on internet governance, the issues raised and discussed in it were, are and will continue to be of great importance in our day to day lives as users of the internet. It is important for all internet users to actively participate in the dialogue about its governance and not let decisions that concern us being made without being openly discussed in public.

Written by Mara Poniros, AEGEE-Peiraias; Holger Schmitt, AEGEE-Berlin; Pavel Zbornik, Comité Directeur and Giancarlo Nicolò, AEGEE-Udine.