[franky47]

    But the plans were on display…”
    “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
    “That’s the display department.”
    “With a flashlight.”
    “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
    “So had the stairs.”
    “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.

Douglas Adams wasn't far off.

[vanderZwan]

The interesting part with the EU is that all policy (proposed and accepted) is actually all organized, findable and out in the open on the internet (and even translated to all official member state languages IIRC)... if you have the mindset of a bureaucrat and know the system.

I know because my ex did European Studies and knew how to navigate those websites. I for the life of me cannot figure out how she did it if I try now.

[arp242]

EU website makes the IBM and HP websites seem user-friendly and easy. I tried engaging with some of the Open Source stuff a few years ago, and I definitely felt like I needed a "European Studies" PhD to be able to navigate all of that.

[vanderZwan]

TBF, when my former partner explained the system to me, it did feel like a lot of the complexity was inherent to the problem of what the EU as a project is trying to achieve. It is not a trivial problem to solve.

Another issue is basically the legal analogy of how certain difficult programming languages impose a selection bias on who actually is willing to learn it, which then leads to an echo-chamber culture where most people underestimate the issues with the programming language.

[orwin]

A really good friend of mine created the first version of eur-lex.europa (hopefully it's that one, it was a website for lawyers to find European legislation and case law), he barely finished his first internship at the time, only had one true web project on his belt (and two weeks of intensive formation), and was spectacularly underpaid (not for his inexistant qualifications, but for the work he did).

I thought he did a good work, but I was a student too so maybe I was just impressed with basic stuff (highly likely).

[TiredGuy]

Sounds like it might be a good web-scraping project for a civic-minded group or individual: scrape the sites, unify and organize them into something more approachable and discoverable.

I know in the US we have orgs like Code for America and events like National Day of Civic Hacking. Does the EU have similar groups and events? I wonder if this could be presented to something like that.

[janejeon]

As someone else said, sounds like an interesting project to scrape, organize, and somehow "re-surface" that data in a much more accessible manner (how? I don't know; I've never done such a project before).

Obviously it should be said that such a project shouldn't be needed in the first place in an ideal world, but it does sound like something I might be interested in chipping in regardless (and a great learning opportunity).

[hunter2_]

I am the last person to suggest throwing AI at a random problem, but this actually sounds like a good match for LLM training/prompting...

[qingcharles]

It's sad, but this actually happened.

There was an episode of the Mark Thomas Comedy Product where he describes how they were trying to find the spending habits of EU MPs, but they were in a basement with no electronic devices allowed, so they hired an army of students to run up and down with notebooks and pens and relay all the information to more students upstairs who had to type it all up and put it online.