11 May 2026

ProPublica's annual general meeting will take place this year on June 11th.

As stated in our articles of association, members are welcome to send us proposals no later than two weeks before we hold the general meeting, i.e. no later than May 28. Proposals should be sent to info(at)propublica.dk

If you want to participate, send an email to info(at)propublica.dk, after which you will receive a meeting link.

Agenda for the general assembly
- Election of moderator and vote counters
- Report from the board
- Submission of financial account for approval
- Decision of membership fee
- Discussion of proposals received
- Presentation of action plan and budget
- Election of board of directors and deputy directors
- Election of auditor
- Other business

The post General assembly 11 June first appeared on ProPublica.

12 May 2025

ProPublica's annual general meeting will take place this year on June 12th.

As stated in our articles of association, members are welcome to send us proposals no later than two weeks before we hold the general meeting, i.e. no later than May 28. Proposals should be sent to info(at)propublica.dk

If you want to participate, send an email to info(at)propublica.dk, after which you will receive a meeting link.

Agenda for the general assembly
- Election of moderator and vote counters
- Report from the board
- Submission of financial account for approval
- Decision of membership fee
- Discussion of proposals received
- Presentation of action plan and budget
- Election of board of directors and deputy directors
- Election of auditor
- Other business

The post General assembly 12 June first appeared on ProPublica.

13 May 2024

The citizens in Denmark's second-largest city, Aarhus, should have a fair and balanced impression of the conditions in the area of ​​health and care in their municipality, and the employees in the health and care sector should feel comfortable interfering in the public debate.

These are the goals of the openness training that the Magistrate's Department for Health and Care in Aarhus Municipality is launching today.

"My goal is to create a workplace where there is enough psychological security for us to dare to speak out loud about our own mistakes so that we can learn from them," explains Christian Budde, political head of the health and care sector in Aarhus Municipality.

"If elder care only gets attention when there are scandals or huge successes, then it is not a fair and balanced picture of everyday life here. And now we firmly state that it is not just ok, but even welcome, for employees to talk about their work and working conditions. Even if they don't think the same as me", Christian Budde underlines. 

"Our democratic community does not develop by itself"

ProPublica has developed the openness training concept for and in collaboration with Aarhus Municipality. It is the municipality's own employees who are responsible for the training of their colleagues.

The training lasts three hours and consists of various modules. They aim to strengthen the managers' and employees' insight into the role and responsibility of the municipality and the press in the public debate; to strengthen their knowledge of the rules on freedom of expression for public civil servants; and finally to prepare managers and employees for meeting the press.

"Our democratic community does not develop by itself, and we should all take responsibility - including public authorities and their administrative and political leaderships. This is an example of what it can mean in practice," says Thomas Dybro Lundorf, founder and board member of ProPublica.

Hope others will be inspired

He welcomes Aarhus Municipality's initiative.

"It's great to see that Aarhus is leading the way. We hope that other authorities and decision-makers will be inspired," says Thomas Dybro Lundorf.

If the course is a success, it is Aarhus Municipality's and ProPublica's plan that the openness training concept will later be made freely available to other public authorities.

The post Denmark's second-largest city launches transparency training developed in collaboration with ProPublica first appeared on ProPublica.

18 January 2024

There is a traffic hub in Vienna called Bahnhof Ottakring. It's fair to say that it's the place you don't hang around too much. As Katharina Toth from Vienna Climate Team puts it:

- It's quite ugly.

Thousands of people pass through every day. Imagine a relatively large space consisting of 1.600 square meters of grey concrete, suffocatingly hot during summertime, not very adapt to the more frequent heat waves and heavy showers that climate changes imply. That's it.

But not for very much longer.

More than a thousand proposals

In a pilot project initiated for 2022/2023, the city council of Vienna has put the Austrian capital's citizens and their ideas in front of a green transformation of the city. The city council of Vienna Climate Team facilitated citizens to present ideas and decide which climate project drafts should be carried out in the city districts with a pre-defined budget of around 20 euros per citizen.

More than a thousand ideas and proposals came up in each pilot year.

This may not be hard evidence of a functioning and vibrant local democracy. But it could be an indicator.

In the Viennese experiment, for a citizen-generated idea to become reality, it must pass through a series of phases involving a revision process of experts of the City of Vienna, co-creation workshops with citizens and experts as well as the selection of a project draft by a representatively selected citizens’ jury. Long story short, as a consequence, the area around Bahnhof Ottakring will soon be greener, and that will be a consequence of a citizen driven initative.

-More trees, more climate adaptation measures, an infrastructure where people can make events […]. To make the square more attractive, the streets are to be greened, the quality of stay improved, parking spaces reduced, trees planted and so on, as Katharina Toth describes the “Main square Ottakring” project.

Outreach: Working with local multipliers

One of the critical elements of the whole project has been to make the locals aware of it. To that end, Vienna's climate team have used a wide range of communication channels.

- We are working with local multipliers, organizations that hand over the information to their members. That's a big help. It can be organizations for migrants or religious communities, for example, Katharina Toth explains.

Katharina and her colleagues have also used the city's social media platforms and newsletters, posters, and one-on-one communication with people at various events in the city.

"Wien mitgestalten"

The online citizen participation platform used by Vienna's city council is another example of the city's communicative initiatives. It is not unlikely that the platform's content design and user experience make a significant communicative difference. Vienna's online participation platform, ’Wien mitgestalten’,is developed by the Belgian tech company CitizenLab, but there are others on the market.

The citizens' ideas on the online platform are pretty easily visible, and the simple and functional design makes it look welcoming.

The platform provides the local government with a digital infrastructure they can use to systematize and display the idea generation of the citizens. For the project Vienna Climate Team, at the platform's front end, citizens can follow their ideas and those of their fellow citizens in the progression of the five phases, where experts and citizen juries contribute to developing and selecting the proposals.

The selection criteria for the ideas are clear and easily accessible, and you can find examples of other climate mitigation and green transition projects and inspiration if you need it.

With around 8.000 registered users out of a total population in Vienna of 2 million inhabitants, the platform isn't exactly used by everyone in Vienna. Still, it is an exciting example of how citizen participation and local democratic engagement can be promoted by government communication.

It is also possible to propose climate mitigation projects offline.

The selection process

For an idea to become a reality, it must pass five phases within the Vienna Climate Team project.

First of all, it must emerge. In the first phase, every resident in Vienna can send in their ideas based on the previously mentioned criteria. In the second phase, the ideas are checked by experts from the City of Vienna.

In the third phase, the citizens behind the ideas work with the city's experts in project workshops to develop the ideas and maximize their impact. In the fourth phase, a representatively selected group of citizens from each participating district decide which project drafts will be implemented within the budget limit. And then, in the end, the project drafts that slip through the eye of the needle are implemented within the next two years.

In the district Ottakring, 471 ideas were transformed into 38 project drafts. Out of these 38 project drafts, a representatively selected citizen jury pointed out three project drafts to turn into reality.

Using Climate Fresk to support an informed debate

Be it climate change, elderly policy, or the war in Ukraine; the more you think something is important, the more you will be willing to do something about it. And, of course, you need to know about climate change to think it's important. That way, access to reliable information is a prerequisite for a democratic society.

So, how does the city council of Vienna work to ensure that the proposals from the citizens are based on reliable information?

- The citizen jury has a preparation day where all the jury members of all the districts involved come together. On top of that, there's a jury weekend, Katharina Toth explains.

On the preparation day, the jury members play an adapted version of the collaborative climate change workshop game Climate Fresk, a recently developed French concept based on data and statistics from IPCC reports. It has received global media attention and has been used by more than a million participants in more than 130 countries, according to their website.

- In five rounds of the game, the jury members gradually discover 37 cards and put them together in a logical sequence of cause and effect of climate change. We have adapted the content of the game to the situation in Vienna based on the climate road map of Vienna, Katharina Toth says.

In 2023, the juries recommended 34 project drafts for implementation. These were presented at a festive closing event. It was also announced that the Vienna Climate Team will continue from late summer 2024.

Read more:

• Do you want to learn more about citizen participation and new democratic institutions? Then check out this OECD report from 2020 with good practice principles for deliberative processes, based on empirical evidence gathered by the OECD in collaboration with leading practitioners from government, civil society, and academics.
  
• Fewer than one-third of the respondents in a 2021 OECD survey covering 22 OECD countries feel the political system in their country allows them to have a say in government decision-making. Read in the OECD report Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy
  
• • From 1979 to 2023, at least 80 622 citizens have been randomly selected to participate in a deliberative process. Read more in the 2023 Trends in Deliberative Democracy: OECD Database Update

The post Communicating citizen-driven climate action in Vienna first appeared on ProPublica.

5 January 2023

All over Europe, governments spend millions of Euros on campaigns and communication, impacting people’s lives and the public debate.

From the tiniest SoMe post to nation-scale, multichannel campaigns, governments reach out to people to inform, engage, and discuss.

But how many of these efforts are a good use of the taxpayers’ money? To what extent do they make people’s lives easier and our democracies better?

Sharon Rosenrauch leads a behavioural science unit in the Australian government. We met her online to talk about the impact of government communication in general and how her team helps her government communicate with citizens about a policy like the renewable energy transition or through a campaign.

Taking the time to understand people

In general, she and her colleagues start by researching and understanding the people that a policy is targeting.

- It won’t always be the whole population. If you’re looking to develop a policy, for example encouraging women to enter into the electrical engineering workforce field, in that case, you’re not necessarily targeting men. So, we start by researching the people that the policy is targeting.

Sometimes, she points out, policymakers make assumptions based on their reality of the world, and the reason that people aren’t engaging in a certain behaviour isn’t always the reason policymakers think it might be.

- For instance, you might be trying to get young people to sign up for a program, but you are experiencing low sign-up numbers. You assume the problem is low awareness. People just don’t know the program exists, you think. Therefore, what you need is a giant comms campaign to increase awareness, right?

A costly exercise

Well, not necessarily. Sharon and her colleagues encourage policy teams to engage with the people a policy is impacting, through interviews and surveys, before doing anything else.

- We might find that it isn’t awareness that is causing the low sign-up numbers, but actually, you’re targeting a relatively young population who access everything through their mobile device – and the website could be incredibly un-user friendly on a mobile device.

In that case, an intervention seeking to increase knowledge about the program through a communication campaign might lead to the opposite of the desired effect, she explains. That is, more people knowing about the program, more people using their phones to get more info, more people left frustrated and with a bad experience.

- That’s a really costly exercise that you’ve just done. It’s either done nothing, or it has had a boomerang effect, Sharon says.

Engaging with the target audience is the best way to work out their current levels of knowledge, capacity, reference, and how they want to be communicated with, she explains.

- Do they even want to be communicated with, or are you actually annoying them? Sometimes, it’s a minimal just in time communication that’s going to have the desired behavioural effect.

According to the Australian behavioural scientist, a lot of public communication campaigns do not take real-world behaviour into account. Instead, they’re based on the assumptions that people in government make without necessarily talking to the people who are ultimately going to be the recipients of the messages.

Social licencing in the green transition

Like many other countries, Australia is working to transform its energy supply systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement. For that purpose, Sharon and her team are particularly interested in researching a concept that emerged from the mining industry - social license.

Essentially, Sharon explains, when applied to a energy transition, it refers to building and maintaining community support for renewable energy infrastructure projects, like hosting infrastructure on their land.

- We found through some of our research that local opposition is not driven by the things you’d think. People are generally very pro-renewables, but some infrastructure issues are poorly understood, for example some of the transmission lines that transport the renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s ultimately being used, she says.

- If that story hasn’t been told, or if the way it’s been told hasn’t been understood, it leaves a lot of room for people to come in with their alternative narratives. Sometimes, those narratives have vested interests, whether they’d be commercial or political in nature. And that’s where we see ambiguity and confusion escalate and trust decline, she argues.

But isn’t there a risk here of reducing legitimate democratic opposition to green transition projects to some stories that just haven’t been shared with the population yet?

- Well, this isn’t just our narrative. This is a narrative that is informed by the learned people in communities. I might not even call it ‘our’ narrative because it’s a predominantly global narrative based on consensus from scientists around the world. So, it comes from an evidence base.

That said, Sharon doesn’t see the criticism as a bad thing at all.

- You don’t want a population that has a blind fate in government. A healthy level of skepticism and questioning is an important part of a healthy democracy. Accountability is important when spending taxpayer dollars.

Citizen assemblies should be used with caution

In Europe, citizen assemblies and juries seem to be established more and more often to increase the engagement and commitment of local communities.

But Sharon argues that we need to be mindful of how we use, operate and encourage those kinds of forums. It’s about 'showing healthy caution’, she says.

They can be empowering forums for people who wouldn’t otherwise have a voice. But sometimes, she warns, bringing a large group of people together can lead to more biased decision-making than providing more diverse opportunities for more people to provide feedback.

- Human beings, despite our suits and make up, are ultimately animals. We like to forget that. There is a level of psychological safety that comes from thinking or responding in the same way as your peers.

Social desirability and group think

Therefore, ensuring that there is a system in place to control some of those group-based biases is important. Social desirability bias is a big one, she points out. Generally, people will look to the perceived leader of a community to tell them how to behave. And, she argues, that that is perhaps not a very democratic decision-making forum.

There are ways to mitigate biases, though.

- The way that you do that [control the bias, ed.] is that you withhold the leader from expressing their views until the end. You encourage engagement from the quieter voices in the room, she says.

Another potential bias to arise in such forums is groupthink, which is essentially when a few voices start saying the same thing, and then all of a sudden, everyone thinks the same.

To avoid that, “red teams” can be activated inside the group where a few people have been told to express a dissenting view. The act of having to consider alternatives and think of appropriate rebuttals broadens people’s perspectives and asks them to consider the merits of their position.

- Finally, it is very important to make sure that governments aren’t giving people symbolic voice and a false belief that they have the possibility to influence decisions that have already been made. Transparency is key and should be a guiding principle in all public communications, Sharon says.

Read more

• Is it difficult to get through with the message in your organization of involving your target groups before you launch campaigns? Then maybe these tips on how to do it in Sharon Rosenrauch's article Overcoming barriers to meaningful engagement with the help of behavioural insights at Apolitical.
• Australian authorities work systematically with feedback and involvement. Read APS (Australian Public Service) framework for engagement and participation here.
• Interested in good advice on citizen involvement (deliberation) in the form of citizens' assemblies and citizens' councils? Check out this fine OECD report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions from 2020, in which close to 300 representative deliberative processes are examined.

Inspired? Become a ProPublica volunteer!

Want to write an article for us on an important topic? Organize an online workshop, apply for funds for a research project or the 117 other things we haven't thought of yet? Then become a volunteer with us - read how here.

The post “Do they even want to be communicated with, or are you actually annoying them?” first appeared on ProPublica.

19 September 2023

- In my darker moments, I feel like it's almost as if we're at the end of the long period of the Enlightenment, where facts don’t matter to people anymore.

Professor Michael X. Delli Carpini is careful to make reservations. He doesn’t want to sound overly dramatic. And he’s addressing American government communication and the American public debate specifically.

Still, he thinks there’s a lot at stake these years and that government and public sector communication play important roles in the defining historical situation we’re in, increasingly influencing how civic debate cultures unfold as one of the core features of liberal democracy. Not only in the US but everywhere in the Western World, including Europe.

To the American professor, the post-truth era, with its politically induced and social media-fueled fact-relativism, is a grave threat to our societies.

- I don’t want to believe that facts don’t matter to us anymore. Because then it leads to thinking that maybe democracy is not the system that works best, he says.

- But I'm committed to democracy enough as the only authentic, fair way to govern that I think we should be focusing on ways in which that can be changed.

Elected officials shape views on government

One of the most important drivers of people’s trust in representative democracy is the representatives themselves.

“The way people shape their views about government at large is through elected officials, whether it’s a governor of a state or a mayor of a town, or the president of a country, or the congress and the legislators of the country,” Delli Carpini points out.

Recent research from London University College has indicated that a popular democratic reform would be if ‘politicians spoke more honestly’ and showed significant public support for stronger mechanisms to uphold integrity among politicians.

“Norms at a minimum, rules as much as possible”

Along those lines, Delli Carpini argues that a public official who's in a leadership position, like a president or a minister, has a big responsibility.

He thinks it ought to be a natural thing for someone holding a public office to be honest. But looking at reality, Delli Carpini argues that it might be a good idea to consider clearer democratic guidelines for government and public sector communication or even regulation.

- I think that there should be norms at a minimum and rules as much as possible on how public leaders communicate and what they communicate about, Delli Carpini explains.

Norms should address what we as citizens should expect from our elected officials and public authorities regarding their communication and contribution to the civic debate. Just as we expect the public institutions to provide decent health care, roads, trains, schools, sanitation and so on.

Democratic values

But, he underlines, it’s a tricky question. On one side, we don’t want a president or a prime minister to lie to us or manipulate us. On the other side, we don’t want to limit freedom of speech either, since the right for anyone to say what they want is a fundamental part of our democracy.

- The commitment to free public speech, especially in politics, makes it very difficult to hold accountable what is said, Delli Carpini points out.

For that reason, he thinks discussing government and public sector communication norms is both important and the absolute minimum we should do.

- I think that however you communicate [as a government or public sector communicator, ed.], whatever you’re communicating, it should be in service of a set of democratic values.

Factual as best we can

Delli Carpini argues that it is important that we as citizens can rely on what is being said by ministers, mayors and public sector authorities when they communicate and put forth their initiatives, projects, and ideas.

Whatever ministers or mayors or public authorities are arguing, they should be doing it within a factual framework – as best we can understand the facts.

- I mean “fact” in quotes because sometimes it's hard to know what exactly a fact is. But ideally, people should be able to disagree on, for example, what the right policy might be for controlling climate change, but it shouldn’t be, ‘well, there is no climate change,’ given the overwhelming scientific evidence, Delli Carpini says.

Sometimes, we think we know the truth

He points out that in product advertising and in most areas of consumer culture, rules govern what can be put out to the public and that companies are generally not allowed to say what they want without certain proof or evidence. But when it comes to government communication, it is not so.

- I understand, at least in the United States, the fear that regulating political speech can slip over into inappropriately preventing people from being allowed to say certain things.

He declares himself ‘enough of a civil libertarian’ to say that sometimes we think we know the truth, and then it turns out we are wrong.

- But if there is a serious commitment to trying to be fact-based and trying to uphold the values of a democracy, that gets you a long way.

What troubles him, drawing mostly on the US but also referring to the situation in other parts of the world, is that, in his view, putting forth clearly untruthful claims used to trigger a negative reaction in the public, acting as a way to keep public officials accountable. That’s not the case now.

- We seem to be at a moment in the United States where people can know that what a public official is saying is factually wrong, yet still support that person. There is no price to pay for misleading the public. 

Democratic education

A fact-based civic debate alone is not enough to make people supportive of democracy, according to Delli Carpini. Something more is needed.

- This is not only about how communicators can communicate better and in ways consistent with fundamental principles of democracy. It is also about how we work with citizens in order to get them to catch the pitch and to understand what to do with it.

According to the professor, it’s about how we prepare citizens to live in a democracy. It’s about democratic education. He is not overly proud of the conditions in his own country.

- In the United States, we do a terrible job of educating people about democracy. I think it probably varies significantly in various parts of Europe, but you both need a communications environment from the public sector that provides useful and usable information, but you also need a citizenry that knows what to do with that information. So part of this is also working with school systems, for example.

A democratic public sector communication approach
The elected officials, the school system, the news media and the citizens, all vital components of democracy, playing important parts in making democracy work in practice.

This is also true for the people working with government and public sector communication, the government and public sector communicators.

In fact, public sector communicators and special advisors could potentially have a very significant say because of their work function.

- Some of the most effective critiques of elected officials who fail to follow democratic values and a fact-based approach could come from the very people who work for them. That could be done in a way that’s very public, where people could resign, for example, or it could be done as a critique that could be built into the system.

Along that line of thought, Delli Carpini calls for a stronger and clearer democratic self-conscience from public communicators.

- Developing an approach, a theory, a practice of public sector communication that is as well developed as in marketing and branding but which is developed specifically for public sector communication: That would be phenomenal.

Michael X. Delli Carpini is Emeritus Professor of Communication & Democracy at the Annenberg School for Communication at Pennsylvania University in the USA.

His research explores the role of the citizen in democratic politics, with particular emphasis on the impact of mass media and information and communication technologies on public opinion, public deliberation, political knowledge, and political participation.

In 2008, Delli Carpini received the Best Book Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research for his book “What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters”.

In 2020, he contributed to The Handbook of Public Sector Communication, edited by Vilma Luoma‐aho and María‐José Cane, with a chapter betitled “Public Sector Communication and Democracy.”

The post Klarere normer for offentlig kommunikation: “Næsten som om fakta ikke længere betyder noget” first appeared on ProPublica.

22 August 2023

On 3 August 2023, the Swedish government launched an investigation to map and analyze 'certain parts of the Swedish authorities' information and communication activities', as it is stated in the Swedish Ministry of Finance's communication about it.

From the description (in Swedish) of the investigation, it is described that the Swedish government in its financial bill for 2023 has emphasized that the main tasks for the state must stand out clearer and that the core tasks of the public authorities must be prioritized.

'Informing and communicating is a natural and important part of the work of many public authorities - but the question is how much communication and which types of communication are appropriate based on the tasks that the authorities have,' according to the Swedish Ministry of Finance press release.

The number of public sector communicators is rising

The press secretary for Erik Slottner, the Swedish Civil Affairs Minister, refers to the findings of a Swedish expert group in public finance studies in the report The Swedish expert groups 2021 report 'No commercials please' from 2021, in which it was concluded, that Swedish authorities' communication activities have grown over time.

In 2019, approx. 3,600 people worked with information and communication at least 40 percent of their working time, an increase of 46 percent compared to 2006.

Do the tasks of the authorities match reality?

It seems perfectly reasonable to examine whether the amount of communication fits the tasks that the authorities have.

It would probably be just as reasonable to investigate whether the tasks of the authorities fit the reality of which we are a part. 

In both Sweden, Europe and the rest of the Western world, we hear about the crisis of trust and legitimacy of participatory democracy and liberal democracy, about disinformation and misinformation, about influence operations from foreign powers, about big tech's algorithms and their impact on the public debate, about public service media and the rest of the traditional media's impact decline and the consequences this has for the idea of the informed citizen in the enlightened democracy.

Who will carry out those tasks? What role will public communication play in that context in the future? A little, a lot, nothing? The Swedish government's investigation will not provide answers to that. But it would be a good thing to find out what ordinary people think about it at some point.

An old dicussion

The problem is not new in Sweden according to public communication researcher Magnus Fredriksson from the University of Gothenburg. He refers, among other things, to the fact that the Swedish government's investigation description refers to similar debates at the beginning of the millennium, and that the topic has been written about from a research perspective on several occasions.

For example, the political scientist Hanna Kjellgren described in her thesis The state as informer or propagandist? from 2002 the development of Swedish public sector information from the end of the Second World War to around the year 2000.

A weird public debate

Magnus Fredriksson thinks the current public debate about public communication is a bit weird.

- If you take the criticism that, for example, the Taxpayers' Association and the Waste Ombudsman (Swedish interest organisations, ed.) have come up with, then it has focused a lot on the fact that public sector communication costs money. But if you look at what the state puts into failed IT projects, for instance, the costs for public communication are very much smaller.

In Magnus Fredriksson's view, this may be connected to the fact that communicators are highly visible, not least from the perspective of journalists.

- When communicators act as gatekeepers in various cases, such debates arise. Where journalists have tried to get information out of the system and experienced that the communicators have functioned as gatekeepers.

Superficial

Moreover, the communication researcher believes that the debate tends to become superficial. From both sides.

- Those who criticize make quite unvarnished and unfounded claims. But those who defend also find it very difficult to come up with a good defence, I think. They talk about democracy and openness, they talk about transparency and dialogue, but what does that mean? What effect does it have?

- It should be possible for them to document more clearly which positive effects it can have if they initiate different types of efforts. In that respect, I think that they are sometimes a little bad at making good arguments. They often use very general arguments with fancy words like dialogue and democracy and so on, says Magnus Fredriksson.

Government investigation covers only part of the communication work

Ten years ago, in 2013, Magnus Fredriksson was involved in the preparation of the analysis 'With visibility as a guiding star', which is a mapping of the principles that govern Swedish authorities' communication. Communication and press strategies and other management documents from 173 out of 252 state authorities were included. From them it appeared, among other things, that

• 'Reputation management' was an important guiding principle for 85 percent of the authorities
• 'Production', i.e. support of the authorities' core tasks was a guiding principle for 82 percent of the authorities and that
• 'Civil principles', i.e. support for democratic processes, incl. facilitating access to the administration for journalists, was a guiding principle for 65 percent of the authorities

The authorities thus communicated with many purposes and on many matters in 2013. Magnus Fredriksson believes that has not changed.

- I have been following the area, and not an awful lot has changed. So I am a little surprised that they have chosen to examine only the part of the authorities' communication which aims to influence. Because what we have shown is that the authorities do a lot more than that. It is also interesting why it is exactly that type of communication that the government wants to highlight, and not all the other things that the authorities communicate about, says the researcher as the interview ends.

The Swedish government's investigation into the work of communicators working for the state will be published by 4 March 2024 at the latest.

Read more (in Swedish):

The state as informer or propagandist? – Hanna Kjellgren, political scientist, article from the University of Gothenburg, 2002

'With visibility as a guiding star' (2013): Magnus Fredriksson and Josef Pallas: An analysis of which principles govern the communication work in national administrative authorities

the ESO report The Swedish expert groups 2021 report 'No commercials please'

Government instruction 3 August 2023 (a task for the administration, set by the government) from the Ministry of Finance: Assignment to map and analyze certain parts of the authorities' information and communication activities

Press release from the Swedish Ministry of Finance, 3 August 2023: The government commissions the State Office to analyze and map the authorities' information and communication activities

The post Too much or too little? Swedish government investigation of public sector communication coming up first appeared on ProPublica.

9 May 2023

ProPublica has just entered into a cooperation agreement with the French network for public communication Cap'Com, which has been representing 25,000 professionals for 35 years, and is the largest public communication NGO in Europe.

- We are here to promote new democratic quality standards of public communication. This partnership is a step on the way and great news for us and, hopefully, the citizens of Europe a little further down the road, says Thomas Dybro Lundorf, co-founder of ProPublica.

The agreement entails that the two organizations strengthen the exchange of experience and information. The cooperation could also, for instance, help develop better training and networking opportunities for communication and press experts in public authorities at all levels in European countries.

- This partnership with ProPublica is a sign that our professions are organised around common issues. We are convinced of the usefulness of dialogue on a European scale, Yves Charmont says, executive director of Cap’Com.

Cap’Com: The facts

Cap'Com was founded in the 1980s.

It works based on the conviction that communication is an essential part of public administration and a profession that serves the common good. The ambition of this cooperative is to exchange knowledge and experience about public communication to promote the profession's professionalization and ethics.

Cap'Com supports public communicators in France daily through information, networking, and decision-making tools, working groups, training programs, thematic events, and an annual congress.

The French public communication network has recently launched an English-language newsletter called Commonality for public communicators..

Read more about the organisation here: Cap’Com (cap-com.org)

Want to join us?

If you have a good idea for an article or a project, or would you just like to join the team and help develop the world's first NGO for democratic public communication? Then send a few lines to info(at)propublica.dk..

The post ProPublica enters cooperation with Europe's largest organisation of public communicators first appeared on ProPublica.

25 April 2023

Do others inspire you? Do you think public communication is an important part of democracy and democratic debate?

Then the future networks of European public communicators need your ideas, and answers to questions like:

- How might we create a community?
– What should our priorities be for the years to come?

Plug in and join our free online event on Google Meet on the 8th of June from 15.00 to 16.30 (CET).

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The post Dine idéer på bordet! Event & generalforsamling 8. juni first appeared on ProPublica.

In the city of Bergen, a team of police officers in the Western Norwegian police district runs Europe's largest public authority profile on TikTok, measured by followers per inhabitant. The profile Politivest, one of the Norwegian police's online patrols on TikTok, has 823.000 followers in a country with 5.4 million citizens. In comparison, the largest Norwegian online media, VGnett, has just under 140,000 followers on the platform.

Time will tell if the profile lasts. In Norway, like many other western countries, restrictions to access TikTok have recently been introduced for key employees in the public sector. At the time of writing, this applies to i.a. the European Commission and the European Parliament plus countries like Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Estonia, Denmark and Sweden.

But for the time being, Politivest wil stay on the platform.

How does that make sense?

Special telephones and ‘a work-related need'

The answer can be found on the Norwegian government's website regeringen.no. In a post on March 23 2023 , the Norwegian Prime Minister advises ministers and high-ranking employees in the central administration against using TikTok (and Telegram).

It also reads, though, that the use of the app can be upheld if there is 'a work-related need for it', and if separate phones are used that are not connected to the authorities' internal system data.

A separate phone that is, without access to emails, contacts, calendars and other potentially sensitive data.

Cyber security expert: Restrictions and precautions make sense under certain conditions

The restrictions and precautions like the introduction of special TikTok phones make sense under certain conditions if you ask Dr. Sven Herpig. He is the head of the cybersecurity policy and resilience program at 'Stiftung Neue Verantwortung,' a German think tank on tech policy.

- TikTok is an app that collects data. If you belong to one of the target groups for Chinese intelligence operations, such as politicians, activists opposing Chinese politics or minorities oppressed by the Chinese government, then you could be in the danger zone, says Dr. Sven Herpig.

TikTok itself has recently strongly opposed the accusation that the Chinese government, via TikTok's parent company Bytedance, can gain access to users' data. Among other things, they argue that the majority of TikTok's ownership group consists of foreign investors, and that the founders of Bytedance's share is only 20 percent. However, the opaque ownership structure is not something that can prevent Chinese authorities from forcing access to the data if they want to, according to media reports from Western security experts.

It's about being on the safe side cyber security-wise. The Western governments do not want to run the theoretical risk that Chinese authorities could gain access to the data of ministers and key employees, such as their whereabouts, their contacts and their biometric data. Dr. Sven Herpig adds, however, that the risk can be reduced slightly if telephones dedicated to social media use are employed and handled accordingly.

Go or no-go?

So, as a lot of public communicators in Europe might ask themselves these days, go or no-go to TikTok? We would like at ProPublica to give a clear answer. That’s not easy. Asked whether public authorities should generally refrain from using TikTok, i.e. both those who are currently operating on the platform and those who are considering to establish an official profile, Sven Herpig's colleague Dr. Martin Degeling replies:

- If the authority has an official communication task to carry out, there may be good reasons for the communication department to have a profile on TikTok, because it allows to communicate with a specific, young user group that might otherwise be hard to reach.

But the cost/benefit calculation does not only include considerations about the communicative or operational benefit or the more or less real concerns about the Chinese accessing data on the police force’s whereabouts in a western Norwegian city.

- There are also good reasons for not being on TikTok - or indeed any other social media platform. In Germany, for example, the data protection authorities strongly discourage the authorities from running pages on Facebook due to data protection concerns. Authorities should also consider that their use supports the business model of monopolistic private communication platforms that harvest citizens' data, sometimes without explicit consent, Degeling says.

Norwegian police remain for the time being

For the employees who run the Norwegian police's profile Politivest, the cost/benefit analysis currently falls out to TikTok's advantage.

They are going to operate with separate special phones in line with the Norwegian Police Directorate's new recommendations, but they are not going to shut down the profile.

- We have to make some choices, and we consider currently that the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages, says Rune Fimreite, teamlead at Politivest.

- Our communication on the channel primarily consists of preventive messages that benefit the citizens. For example info on what to do if you are exposed to grooming. Children and young people use TikTok as a news channel, and we publish information that is useful for the target group, Rune Fimreite says.

According to Fimreite, it weighs a good deal in the assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of using the channel that TikTok opens the doors to some completely different target groups then the ones they normally communicate with.

- It is an incredibly effective communication channel. We reach a lot of people in a short time. It's an opportunity we've never had before, Fimreite says.

Dance moves and grooming prevention

Politivest’s post with the biggest reach recently show three Norwegian police officers in full uniform performing a series of silly synchronized dance moves to the tunes of DJ Laz's 15-year-old 'boom, shake, drop,' in a so-called trend on TikTok.

That stuff will probably not impress legal advisors, data and cyber security experts or psychologists with expertise in young people's screen use and mental health. But when you consider that that post has so far received more than 5 million views and that more than 6,000 people have commented, almost all of which are overwhelmingly positive, it is a factor that must be taken into account.

As an example of the preventive work done Fimreite and his colleagues, he mentions posts that are also widely shared, giving children and young people knowledge and tools to deal with inappropriate messages on the platform.

This is probably part of the reason why Rune Fimreite & company believes that there is 'a work-related need' to stay on the platform.

In any case, the Norwegian police officers continue to dance and prevent on the profile for the time being.

ProPublica has been in contact with several of Europe's largest public authority profiles on TikTok. Most say that they have not yet made a final decision on whether they will stay or leave TikTok.

The post TikTok, stay or leave? Europe's biggest public authority profiles consider first appeared on ProPublica.