AEGEE is a big non-partisan activist student organisation encouraging youngsters to influence decision makers to create initiatives and legislation for a fairer Europe.

In order to carry out this mission every year AEGEE generates a profusion of image, video and –above all– text content to convey ideas for young Europeans inside and outside the organisation, and influence lawmakers and executive bodies who have the power to determine youngsters' lifes.

This creative deluge is phenomenal. A truly encouraging sign of the potential of young European generations. However as a result of the big amount of content created classifying and making it effective, discoverable and maintainable over time becomes a challenge.

Protection level of some images of this proposal

Some of the images shown in this proposal are Internal according to the AEGEE Data Privacy Policy Statement (DPPS). That means that they should not be published publicly without logging in first with some AEGEE account.

However, given the length of this proposal, for the sake of clarity I believe a few of these images are needed for a correct understanding.

The fact that AEGEE Internal data is published publicly is one of the main points of this proposal. Most of the Internal images contained in this proposal have already been published publicly by some AEGEE body in the past (you will find the link to the public source next to the link to the internal source).

ℹ️ Although they are not exactly the same, the terms data, information and content are used interchangeably among the proposal.

ℹ️ When you see a lock icon 🔒 next to a link you will need an AEGEE membership or AEGEE Google Workspace account to access the link. (this proposal will hopefully change the need for this)

The issues

Let’s start by giving context. In December 2019 a relevant change happened in AEGEE: Google Workspace accounts (GW for brevity, formerly called G Suite) would be given for free to any aegeean who wanted one. That was fantastic news for those who create content in AEGEE. GW is the best tool out there for online collaboration.

Later on in 2020, when I clicked a link shared by some AEGEE body in the AEGEEans Facebook group I hit this screen:

Access walls preventing reading Agora booklets are a great way to encourage participation in our events.

I thought that this was strange, the file linked was something no-risk, like CD decisions or Agora agenda. Information that –intuitively– someone would expect easy access for maximum spread and efficiency. I just assumed this was an error, someone unintentionally forgot to share the document with a public link.

A double-error in fact. Firstly as said, the link was not set as public. And secondly, GW was being used for this kind of information. A blog entry in the right section in aegee.org or the Members Portal would have been a better place for this.

Eventually, after seeing this way of sharing information on several posts of the AEGEEans FB group, asking on the group about this fact and after some research on the several AEGEE websites I learned that this way of sharing information was an intentional data management practice and the subject of the AEGEE Data Privacy Policy Statement (DPPS).

In the next sections it will be explained why some parameters of this DPPS are having a big detrimental effect on the way AEGEE shares information, and how it is drastically preventing internal and external audiences from accessing our organisation’s message and spirit.

Artistic impression of me kindly explaining the contents of this proposal. Note the hair grooming and clothes depiction, reflecting with accuracy the lockdown circumstances in which this text was written.

Too much restricted content

Content generated by AEGEE is regulated under the Data Privacy Policy Statement (DPPS) contained in the CIA. The DPPS states in Article 4.2:

The Data Privacy Committee (DPC) shall publish a list of the data according to the division stated in paragraph (1) of the present Article. This list shall be updated at least once a year and ratified by the Autumn Agora.

This list is the Levels of Protection of Data 🔒 document. The part for this document that this proposal is concerned about is with the section Data Generated by AEGEE-Europe, part that classifies the data generated by our organisation in three levels: external, internal and confidential.

If you look at this graphic from 3 metres apart it becomes the next Cubist masterpiece.

Before we go in depth with the matter, the above graphic is taken from the version 2.0 of the document, published in September 2020. In this version several types of data were removed from each protection box and are not mentioned explicitly anymore. That is why I will be using the previous version 1.2 🔒 (or publicly available) of the document published in May 2016 since it explicitly mentions more types of data:

Classifying AEGEE content in 23 easy steps.

These are the three levels of protection in which all content created by AEGEE bodies must be classified. Everything in yellow needs authentication with some account to gain access. Things like CD or NC decisions, Agora and EPM agendas are especially surprising to see them restricted in an organisation that pretends to mimic a democratic society. Setting these amounts of AEGEE content as internal goes against principles of open data and open government.

In reality, these levels of protection are more restrictive than on paper:

Apologises to people with Daltonism. I can assure you these graphics are different.

Much of the internal data turns confidential because there is no way to know where it is published. Somewhere in a private Google Drive folder. The link is only shared on Facebook or by email. If you missed the announcement you are out of luck. AEGEEans have to constantly ask for Google Drive links to access internal content.

AEGEE publishes the organisation budget 🔒 in Google Drive. But in order to access it you have to 1) Be an AEGEE member, 2) Accept Google Terms and Conditions to use an AEGEE GW account, and 3) Have the link to the PDF file.

Let’s ponder for a second about the full extent of the unjustified restrictions that AEGEE applies to its content and how this compares to similar organisations. In contrast to what AEGEE does, any company that trades in most stock exchanges around the world has to publish publicly a lengthy annual report with its finances (Google, Vodafone, ING). Not only that, this also applies to companies not publicly listed. The annual reports of any British limited company are public. But AEGEE is not a company you may say. You are right, it is a NGO, which I assume to be even more transparent than a company. Let’s look at how other NGOs deal with transparency: Oxfam, Red Cross and Amnesty International. Financial information open and voluntarily available on their own websites, in addition to the public and compulsory UK Register of charities (check Oxfam on this registry). But those are not the kind of NGO that AEGEE is. Umm, let’s get more granular: is AIESEC something more similar to AEGEE? Find publicly its financial information (and in the UK Register of charities). What about ESN? Even they are more transparent than AEGEE! All of them publish reports and nice charts about the organisation's finances and other matters. And do not forget that most developed countries openly report finances, budgets and transparency reports. All this information being available on the Internet with a simple search and no registration whatsoever. It is not an exaggeration to say that the majority of organisations of any kind in the world are more transparent than AEGEE.

AIESEC and ESN urgently need a more restrictive DPPS. Anyone can see their financial statements!

The fallacy to restrict these big amounts of information is always the same: it is necessary because otherwise we overshare too much, at the same time that there is some legal impediment forcing us to do so (but those laws are never specified). AEGEE is obsessed with external risks jeopardising our integrity and freedom of speech (freedom of speech which is crushed by the same DPPS). But it has totally forgotten that the biggest threats are internal. Internal threats that from time to time make some rogue antenna treasurer or board to practise creative accounting. And same internal threats that caused an extraordinary Agora to happen in December. This is what actually poses a real legal risk for AEGEE and not oversharing.

But when was it decided that AEGEE needed this three-level system to protect content? What is the goal of it? The DPPS states in its Article 1 Object and Purpose:

The purpose of this statement is to secure right to privacy of AEGEE members and other individuals, with regard to:

a) the gathering and automatic processing of personal data relating to them;
b) the relationship between AEGEE-Europe, its Ordinary Members and third parties;
c) information and all relevant data about the Association, its work and its members.

Point c) is the statement that closer relates to content generated by AEGEE. But I do not think it explains the purpose of the protection system. If we try to find more information, in Article 4.1 Levels of protection of the data we can read:

Having in mind best practices and aiming to guarantee due usage and corresponding levels of secrecy, all the information of the Association shall be divided into external, internal, and internal confidential.

OK, so we need to guarantee levels of secrecy. But why? Well, to find the answer we will have to go back in time to those ages when the average mobile screen size was between 4 and 5 inches, and you had to go to the supermarket for food instead of ordering it online. So basic!

The real reason for this 3-level protection system was spelled out in the Spring Agora Rhein-Neckar in April 2013 in the motion Creating a policy for public and internal information 🔒 (select Rhein-Neckar, April 2013 agora, then Other Votings, or publicly available):

Text without format is extremely plain. That is why memes and MySpace were invented.

And hell boy, this motion was much clearer about the reasons why a data protection policy should exist in AEGEE:

– ...a lot of information about our organisation [...] is also publicly published on the Internet for the wide world to see.
– Keeping internal matters from the curious eye of the outsiders improves our internal freedom of speech.
– ...in the past, on the website of the Network Commission, information on the fulfillment of Antenna Criteria was publicly available for everyone.
– At the moment, the whole Corpus Iuridicum is publicly available.
– The only internal thing we have to publish by law are our statutes.

Certainly AEGEE is interested in lobbying for the benefit of young people. Because for the benefit of transparency in governments will not be.

Hold on a second, AEGEE actually asks for this, like in statements to ensure the necessary standards of transparency in general elections. And we have the Election Observation project, which sends volunteers to make sure elections run smoothly. Interesting, it seems we demand a lot of transparency, but only in others. Which legitimacy do we have as NGO and exemplary student organisation when we ask governments around the world for transparency, more transparency, and fighting against corruption, but we have an Agora motion with the below statements:

– ...the way we come to conclusions is not of any concern of the outside world.
– ...externals don’t have any right to know about the way we organize our network, nor what our criteria are.
– By consciously publishing information aimed for externals [...] we decide what they see and what they do not.
– All other regulations we have are basically of no concern of the outside world.

The way we come to conclusions IS concern of the outside world. Externals to AEGEE DO have all rights to know how we organise and what is our criteria. AEGEE does not decide which information is or is not relevant to members, locals and outsiders. The other way round, members, locals and outsiders are the ones who decide this. Otherwise AEGEE is not a modern democracy with open government values and moral legitimacy to ask institutions around the world to do what our own organisation refuses to.

Trump wanted to be in the answers’ list. But unfortunately the phrase was too clever for him.

According to the 2013 motion, leaving things like CD decisions, Agora results or amount of votes per local freely available on the Internet worsens our internal freedom of speech (FoS). However, restricting this information for the purpose of retaining partners does not affect our independence nor our FoS. Damn it, the meaning of conflict of interests evolves too quickly! The motion invents a new type of FoS: since this motion worsens the only FoS that exists, the one that you can use with anyone anytime anywhere, it creates the internal FoS, which is no more than the standard FoS but without the right to share information protected by the DPPS. Worried about financial information? It has nothing special. Talking about it should be normalised without accounts or restrictions. Talking about it wherever and whenever is part of our freedom of speech.

The theory of restricting information generated by AEGEE because too much information is (2013 motion verbatim) undesirable and may get public negative publicity proves arguable:

1. It shifts priority from information transparency to a corporatist communication strategy, by fear mongering if we do not do so we will expose ourselves too much and potentially lose partners. We can have an attractive strategic communication and be appealing to partners without sacrificing transparency. Having a well designed website with content properly organised attracts partners. Restricting Action Agendas or Strategic Plans does not. Why do we hide them? We should be proud of them! If we have this false dichotomy of transparency or partners, transparency has priority over partners.
2. It creates a constant dilemma about what constituents external or internal data and the restristrictions that must apply. How can anyone that is about to become member of some antenna know the rules that will have to abide by if, according to the DPPS, non-members should not access the CIA? (even when nonetheless it is publicly available, against the DPPS). 🤷‍♀️ Activity Reports are supposed to be internal data as well, but they have been freely available on Issuu for years. 🤷‍♂️ The Data Privacy Visuals document is internal in theory but public in practice. 🙇‍♀️ Is the Agora opening ceremony external or internal media? Are Golden Times’ pictures of Prytania stage with a presentation on screen internal media?


An AEGEE member who just created some content intuitively finds out whether it is external or internal.

3. Restricting internal content has a massive impact on the discoverability of overall AEGEE content. In case of doubt or because of inertia, content is deemed internal (even when it is not), and hence, rendering it invisible for anyone who does not have or want to use an AEGEE or GW account. Examples of this are the AEGEE Wiki, the PDFs on Issuu (you can see but not download them) and the AEGEE Materials Database, full of external content but still requiring logging in. Restricting external content is against the DPPS. Yet, happening widespread at the moment.


Did you think for a second that you could consume AEGEE content in your own terms?

4. Enforcement of the DPPS is challenging. The AEGEEans and Golden Times Facebook groups, the two most active online places for debate in AEGEE (way ahead of the email lists and the poor forgotten forum) fall inside the type internal media. How can we check that users joining these groups are AEGEE members? What happens to users of these groups when their AEGEE membership expires? Should we ask Chuck Norris to clean these groups of unwanted members? Do we create our own blog and social media platforms? Aegeebook? Instaegee?

Mind you, I am not saying that this 3-level protection system is not beneficial for the purpose of regulating how AEGEE deals with its content, not only for the content generated by AEGEE but also the content collected from antennas. The levels of Protection of Data is a thorough and comprehensive job on data type classification. But in the way it is implemented right now for the AEGEE generated data it is having big drawbacks on the availability of overall content.

The DPPS establishes in Article 4.3:

Changes to the list as defined in paragraph (1) of the present article can be proposed to the DPC (Data Privacy Committee).

Since at the moment there is no DPC, this Agora proposal aims to ease the level of protection for most content generated by AEGEE and consider almost all of it external:

The new DPPS proposed is also greener, and hence, more environmentally friendly.

In this way we solve the 4 problematic points previously discussed:

1. Accessibility is back again. No accounts required.
2. No doubt about the level of protection that data will have: external.
3. No more external data collateratelly deemed internal.
4. Nothing to enforce, just making sure external data remains external.

Audit Commission audit reports on locals move from confidential to internal. Any antenna member should have the right to check this information if wished so. AEGEE is a democratic NGO. It really puzzles me the level of secrecy for some matters. In AEGEE-London we proactively share on our website transparency reports. Money ain’t tabu!

This is a public AEGEE-London Transparency Report. It may be boring. But ultimately it is your best friend.

There is only one kind of content which classifying it as confidential seems reasonable: Mediation Commission decisions. This content covers conflicts happening between AEGEE members and bodies. And special care should be put to ensure leaks do not become gossips and disturb the agreements achieved. However this does not mean that this content cannot be made public, just that in order to do so some special measures must be taken, like leaving 3-5 years time until decisions become external, and blanking out personal data. Also, the MedCom could publish every year a transparency report as part of its Activity Report, where, without giving specific details, it could tell the number of mediations requested, number of them open, closed and other related information. Publishing MedCom decisions was done in the past. No reason why this could not be done again. If these decisions are not published externally to become part of the AEGEE collective memory to set precedents, bodies, locals and individuals risk making the same mistakes again and again.

You better wish these people are actually models so that no one has to work with them. Totally unrelated to the proposal. But I have this fetish for stock pictures of The Apprentice-ish corporate environments. What do you think they are watching on the screen? This proposal being accepted in the Agora?

The 2013 motion and the current implementation have its point. There must be multiple channels for different kinds of information with different levels of protection. But I do not believe in these channels being so restricted. Multiple channels is enough filtering and restrain to have clear feeds of AEGEE information which then different audiences can choose what to read. I do not expect the aegee.org homepage, or the official Facebook or Instagram AEGEE accounts to post about budgets and financial reports (although ESN has done it in the past). But I do expect this information to be proactively available on aegee.org in some non-hidden section, up to date, properly categorised and with an introductory text about the information. Doing so a simple Google search would instantly deliver the information our audience is looking for without the need of logging in or asking someone to get it for you. This, this or this are past half-way attempts within AEGEE, now in need of maintenance and more openness, about how internal information should be handled.

This article from The Washington Post reflects the situation that AEGEE is facing with the content it generates: NGOs are great at demanding transparency. They’re not so hot at providing it (click Free, browse now to read the article):

The bottom line is that citizens and governments no longer buy the narratives that NGOs are automatically principled and trustworthy, and should therefore be exempt from transparency requirements. NGOs should also recognize (and some do) that they will now be judged on criteria they have used to pass judgment on others.

This should be good news for all: If NGOs are principled and virtuous and have nothing to hide, they should welcome the demand for full disclosure.

AEGEE is a NGO and student organisation pushing leaders at local, national and European levels to comply with principles of justice, fairness and transparency. But if we do not apply these very standards to ourselves we will err of hypocrisy and start seeking reasons to justify these practices instead of trying to improve them. Worse of all, they prevent our audience from reaching our message.

Inadequate formats and storage

After reading the previous section you may think, well, making content less restricted is an easy job: since most of the AEGEE content is in the organisation’s Google Drive we just have to change the file sharing settings from private to anyone with the link, isn’t it? That would do little to solve the problem.

The fact that content is publicly available out there on the Internet does not make it automatically useful unless people know that this information is actually there. This is a problem in AEGEE. People do not consume our content not because it is not worth it but because they do not know that it exists at all, nor they can find it by themselves. Our content is not discoverable. Not being discoverable means not being transparent.

Why is our content not discoverable? If we use the definition of discoverability from Wikipedia our content must fulfil three criteria:

1. Document the information about the item (the metadata) [...] in a consistent manner.
   ❌ Since a few years ago AEGEE content –external or internal– is mostly not documented: if it is a PDF it does not have an introductory web page (like this, this or this). And if it is web content it is missing key information like date, tags, categories, path or author (the case of aegee.org). Our content is so little documented that often the only way to know about its existence is by an email or a post on Facebook.
2. Store the documented information (metadata) in a searchable repository.
   ❌ Much of AEGEE content is PDF stored in Google Drive. So it cannot be searched by a simple Google search (you only can search inside the AEGEE Materials Database if you are an AEGEE member and want to use a GW account, and not all content is in the Materials Database).
3. Enable yourself and others to search for the documented information in an efficient manner.
   ❌ The format in which most of the content is created –PDF– complicates the way information can be found and searched, turning it into a not very efficient task. In PDF you only can search words. In HTML (and related data formats like XML and JSON) you can create interactive searching systems comparing different data sources (commonly known as Google).

Did I mention PDF? It is 2021, but the vast majority of content created by AEGEE is stored in digital static rectangles that will never be printed. It is using a similar format than ancient content 2,000 years ago. It does not take advantage of modern web formats (HTML) and the possibilities that Content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress offer to deliver our content to the world.

This is the other big problem with content in AEGEE: PDF is overused. You could say: what is wrong with this? We have been doing it for years. It kinda works. The European Union, the Unesco and many other big institutions publish lots of PDFs as well. Umm, if we play this game we can also say that there is even a bigger number of institutions and companies that publish most of its content in HTML. Starting by the very same European Union, the British Government, or the Spanish Government. In the private sector, especially in the tech industry, PDFs are not very practical. The sheer majority of documentation is HTML. Good luck finding a PDF on these sites: Google, Apple, Microsoft.

Let me carefully explain with the below table why PDF is not the best format for content compared to HTML, and how it worsens our discoverability:

By using PDFs we do not separate content from style, unlike HTML. That means that with HTML the reader can change the way the content is shown in infinite ways: open the bottom-left corner menu to select a theme (on mobile the right-top corner menu ).

This cannot be done with PDF.

This limitation has special implications for people with visual impairment. It unnecessarily makes their life harder because assistive tools cannot work as efficiently in PDF. Time to remember that AEGEE supports people with vision disabilities and handicaps. Now we have to put this pretext into practice.

If you love that child you better don't give him PDF for his braille display.

This lack of control over style does not only affect the content consumer but also the content creator. With HTML, changing the style of thousands of files is a matter of clicks. It is an automated process. With PDF instead, changing the style of thousands of files is simply impossible. It is a manual process involving many Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. Why would we like to change the style of so many files? To standardise style. By using HTML and a CMS like WordPress enforcing an uniform style is much easier than in PDF.

PDFs also change the context where the content is consumed. By using HTML we can control and assure that a link clicked will open in the same or a new tab (we can instruct the browser either way). But with PDFs we cannot guarantee where the file will open. It may open on the browser. It may open on another programme. It may just download. Or –less likely yet possible– it may not open at all. It may open with pages screen-wide zoomed. Or maybe showing two pages fitted to screen. We do not have control over it. It is a small consideration. But in conjunction with the current restricted access of internal PDFs it diminishes the number of people enjoying our content.

Stonks.

So given all the above drawbacks that the PDF format has it would be good for our organisation to help content creators to find out which format is the correct fit for every kind of text content. On a general note, most content should be HTML. But there is still a small number of content which PDF is actually the best fit. This is why this proposal wants to introduce the AEGEE Content Format Guidelines for text content:

The format of an AEGEE text content generated by AEGEE-Europe bodies must be chosen following these guidelines. Otherwise the publication will not be valid. Locals are excluded from following these guidelines.

Publishing content only in HTML or in double format HTML-PDF is not new to AEGEE: excepting the most recent ones, all the papers and manifestos published here are exclusively in HTML. This manifesto is in both HTML and PDF. Then we have other content which has a small introduction in HTML but the content is in PDF, like this, this or this. Not ideal but better than purely PDF in Google Drive.

There are some issues regarding content presentation with the current aegee.org website though. Both The Golden Times and The AEGEEan use categories to, well, categorise content. aegee.org partially does it as well, but only for some content. And the list of categories available nor the category that an article is part of are visible to the user. The publication date of an article is not shown. And the visual style of text is not the best for reading purposes. A sticky table of contents (like the one of this proposal) would help to progress through long articles (1, 2, 3). The good news? These are minor issues easy to fix as long as the content is in HTML. Because remember, HTML separates content from style. PDF does not.

This looks promising! We already have the IT infrastructure needed to start publishing discoverable, accessible and versatile HTML content. We just need to start publishing more content in HTML, specially announcements and the CIA.

Let’s talk about these two kinds of content because they are a tad egregious and an example of how AEGEE remains somehow stuck in the past when times come to deal with digital text content:

• CD, NC or any other body’s decisions and announcements: this kind of content is brief in length and short-lived in relevance. Any average Joe would publish this as a public blog post. Instead, AEGEE decides to go old school and create an individual PDF for every month, every month containing the same board introduction, yet very importantly, with a different colour and cover illustration. Clearly, these customisations are worth the use of PDF over HTML and reusable links. These PDFs being only available if you do not miss the link on Facebook. Ultimately, remember that the reason behind this intricate way of publishing announcements is because, otherwise, we would be getting negative publicity and scaring off partners. Do not misunderstand me, the artwork is cool. But a better place for it would be the corresponding blog entry and not a PDF.


AEGEE Autumn-Winter colour collection. Out now.

• The CIA: the constitution of our organisation, it is a text purely technical, with hundreds of articles that should be referenced individually with easiness, and content that is modified and republished on a regular basis. A sticky table of contents would be precious to know at every moment in which part of the document the reader is. Drafts, versioning and collaborative editing are essential features for an ideal edition of the CIA. It is the perfect content for a long WordPress article! Instead? PDF is used… With no table of contents’ metadata (only the initial ToC is clickable), without possibility to link to specific articles from outside the PDF. The big table at the end looks horrible when it is split among several pages. And get ready to stress your patience to the limit when copying text. This way of elaborating the CIA is not only cumbersome for readers, but also for writers: there are continuous manual adjustments at the end of every page to fit paragraphs before the page ends. And it seems that the final CIA PDF is a merge of multiple PDFs. But why then the Antenna Criteria is also published in HTML? We can not just publish the entire CIA in HTML?
  Update beginning 2022: the CIA text has been moved from the now defunct public Members Portal in PDF to a Google Drive's 🔒 Google Doc. However for some reason now you can not save or even copy text from the CIA document.


The CD has decided for you that copying and downloading this text is absolutely not necessary.

The Comité Directeur 58 was aware of all the different places where information is stored within AEGEE and wants to do something about it: on the Autumn Agora 2020 Activity Plan 🔒 we can find the Knowledge Management System objective (p13) to use a single unified platform for the knowledge stored in the AEGEE Materials Database, MyAEGEE, shared drives in Google Workspace, Members Portal, the Wiki and the old Intranet. This objective does not mention explicitly any issues with PDF content. But I can see here margin to include as one of the solutions a reduction in PDF content and an increase in HTML content.

The situation in which an organisation like AEGEE overuses PDFs is not new. Bigger organisations have been through this before. The Government Digital Service –the British department taking care of all government websites– published in 2018 Why content should be published in HTML and not PDF. And now the vast majority of British government content is HTML. It was not about technology or big budgets but about changing publishing habits within government departments. Civio, a Spanish NGO pushing for transparency in governments and public administrations, published in 2019 an article asking for the Spanish Registry of Companies (Registro Mercantil) to be free and publicly accessible in HTML and not in PDF.

An organisation like AEGEE cannot afford to have such an unorganised way of documenting its existence. We need to improve the way we store our content. A chaotic amalgamation of PDFs is one of those things that do look bad in front of partners. It gives a subpar impression from an organisation that pretends to be serious about its job and mission. This proposal, together with the Knowledge Management System objective, is hopefully the beginning of a modern take on data management in AEGEE.

The Solutions

This proposal is actually two proposals, each of them with a different entry in the AEGEE Voting System:

Easing the levels of protection

Much of the data generated by AEGEE-Europe is overly restricted. This proposal amends the Data generated by AEGEE-Europe section of the DPPS so that most of this data is discoverable with a simple Google search and without the need of extra accounts. In this way we allow our message to reach further and a wider audience to consume our content. No more hidden information because you missed the link on Facebook.

You can find this proposal in the Voting System 🔒.

Read the Too much restricted content section for an explanation of the reasons behind this change.

Introducing the Content Format Guidelines

AEGEE-Europe relays too much on PDF for text content. Switching to HTML for the vast majority of new text content will bring advantages for writers and readers. By introducing these guidelines an AEGEE body or member creating new text content can find out what is the best format for its work.

It also adds the new Article 8 to the CIA's DPPS:

8) Data Management

1. In order to guarantee an adequate management, classification and storage of data and content generated by AEGEE-Europe bodies over time, the Content Format Guidelines must be followed.
2. The purpose of the Content Format Guidelines is to make AEGEE-Europe content organised and accessible. Content must be searchable and discoverable in a quick and consistent way.
3. Changes to the Content Format Guidelines can be proposed by any ordinary member with the proposal procedure.

You can find this proposal in the Voting System 🔒.

Read the Inadequate formats and storage section for an explanation on the introduction of these guidelines.

Precedents

During previous Agoras the topic of external and internal information in AEGEE has been discussed directly or indirectly. I briefly enumerate the times this happened.

• 2013 motion: Creating a policy for public and internal information
• 2014 proposal: Changes to Data Privacy Policy Statement
• 2017 motion: Motion of Oversharing: Improving communication within AEGEE
• 2018 motion: Motion to develop a new and safer strategy to share and acquire the internal budgets of Locals
• 2020 objective: Knowledge Management System

2013 motion: Creating a policy for public and internal information

This motion presented at the Spring Agora Rhein-Neckar 2013 🔒 and meticulously analysed on the Too much restricted content section is the reason why 8 years later this proposal is happening. It was the seed for the current DPPS, a policy that actually is necessary for an organisation like AEGEE, but whose restrictive and sketchy implementation of the Data generated by AEGEE-Europe section has margin for improvement.

2014 proposal: Changes to Data Privacy Policy Statement

After extensive research by the Mediation Commission, during the Spring Agora Patra 2014 🔒 the DPPS is extended with this propossal with the changes requested one year earlier in the 2013 motion.

Data within AEGEE is hereafter classified as external, internal or confidential.

2017 motion: Motion of Oversharing: Improving communication within AEGEE

This motion presented by AEGEE-Enschede at the Autumn Agora Catania 2017 🔒 (or publicly available) asked the MedCom to supervise the hundreds of social media accounts of all AEGEE bodies and antennas, and requested the CD to outline comprehensive communication guidelines to protect our internal and external communication.

It seems AEGEE-Enschede was not aware of the existing DPPS dealing with the very same matter. I am not surprised. In 2017 the Materials Database 🔒 or the Helpdesk did not exist yet. So finding the Levels of Protection of Data document was an impossible mission unless someone in AEGEE-Enschede had a copy of it.

No further action happened after this motion.

2018 motion: Motion to develop a new and safer strategy to share and acquire the internal budgets of Locals

This motion presented at the Spring Agora Krakow 2018 🔒 (or publicly available) asked the Audit Commission to strictly forbid the use of [sic] facebook for private information [...] and develop a new strategy or look for a platform to safely share these budgets.

Once again, no due diligence was carried out before writing this motion. If so, the author would have found out that what was asked in the motion already existed in the DPPS under the Data collected from each AEGEE Local section of the Levels of Protection of Data document.

We could argue that the reason for such a basic motion was because finding documentation in AEGEE is not an easy task (hence this proposal). Even when this is true it seems that the main reason for having such low-quality motions at Agoras is because most motions are barely thought for a moment, lack research and ask for things that are already done or are impossible to implement. They seem to be born out of spite as a reactionary move caused by a conflict between bodies. And since asking for things that will have to be done by someone else is free, motion writers go wild with the requested points.

No further action happened after this motion.

2020 objective: Knowledge Management System

Knowledge Management System was an objective of the Comité Directeur 58's Activity Plan 🔒 (p13) from Autumn Agora 2020 to create a single unified platform for the AEGEE knowledge that at the moment it is stored in multiple fragmented platforms.

This objective complements very well the spirit of this proposal to improve discoverability of our content by organising it a bit better.

However, after or around the Online Agora Autumn 2021 two important things happened related to the Knowledge Management System:

• The public Members Portal was shut down and now redirects to MyAEGEE. All HTML content was killed. Public PDFs that could be found here (CIA, Working Formats, motions, Visual Identity, RTC and LTC toolkits) have been moved to the Materials Database 🔒. But now this content has become Internal, when it has been External for more than 10 years. I proposed CD59’s President Teddy van Amelsvoort to migrate this content to the aegee.org website instead of Google Drive since both sites use WordPress and the content would remain public and discoverable. I was ignored. Other content has directly been made unreachable, like the one of the screenshot below.


RIP 2009-2022. Sorry Members Portal, you were too easy to access and navigate for AEGEE standards.

• AEGEE EurActive blog has been shut down after being online for more than 10 years, with dozens of HTML articles in it. The content has not been migrated anywhere. There are still some remainings on here.

The Knowledge Management System has been executed in a way that we are now in a worse position than before this objective started. A lot of HTML content has been killed when it was perfectly fine (reportedly due to outdated content). And the remaining PDFs have been moved to a place where now it requires MyAEGEE and AEGEE GW accounts, content not being discoverable any more.

FAQ

• So much information in the wild is dangerous
• So much information in the wild scares partners
• What do you get by publishing so much information?
• The ITC and HRC have no technical or human resources to implement these changes
• Do I have to learn HTML and JavaScript to publish content in AEGEE?
• Are antennas affected by this proposal?
• How changing some internal data generated by AEGEE to external is affected by the GDPR?
• I live in the People's Republic of Brexistan and I fear that I will be kicked in the arse if my government or employer finds out I am part of AEGEE
• I am happy with how Google Workspace works. Why do you want AEGEEans to stop using it?
• If you do not want to use the GW account you just can ask someone to get you those internal documents you want
• This website looks alright

So much information in the wild is dangerous

Because of the amount of it? Because of the content of it? Unless AEGEE has surreptitious activities and sabotages countries around the world like an agent of the CIA, or creates dodgy advertising campaigns like the media team of a political candidate, our internal content is as inoffensive as a two-week puppy. It has no industrial property, little personal data, and at times it is so politically correct that if a crazy dude would dig deep into our content to find anything that remotely could be considered negative, polemic or fraudulent, it would be an absolute waste of time.

Graphical representation of the level of risk that internal data poses for AEGEE after becoming external.

Multibillion-worth ultra-complex and high security projects like the Linux operating system are developed in open platforms where even personal communications between developers are public. But a student organisation several orders of magnitude smaller cannot cope with things like agora booklets being public, let alone minutes or financial information. A country needs to release this information to the open world to be considered democratic. So must do AEGEE if the organisation wants to stand by its roots and ask countries to be democratic.

But what about European Night pictures? Possibly the most delicate information about you in AEGEE, I advocate for granting them fully confidential status. Gold Strike tastes too good. When you realise it is 50% vol it is already too late. 🍾❌📸👍

So much information in the wild scares partners

Someone will have to create a strong case about which information scares which partners at which level, why that has to lead to collaterally restrict more content, and how come virtually every company, government and NGO out there is able to publish internal information freely yet AEGEE is not. AEGEE cannot sacrifice its freedom of speech or violate principles of transparency because hypothetically some of our internal data might not like to some private company or public institution. This is a massive conflict of interests for a NGO labelled itself as a democratic and political activist organisation. So transgresor and combative for some things. Well conservative and conformist for others.

What do you get by publishing so much information?

Wrong question. The right one is What do you get by restricting so much information?

By being transparent in a proactive way we convey and gain trust from our members and society. In the same way that we want our political leaders to demonstrate their job with documents and facts enforced by law and not blind faith, so AEGEE should do as a democratic organisation. Being transparent is a way to distribute power among a bigger part of society so that decisions are more consensual and scrutiny can be asserted on a regular basis. The more people aware of AEGEE facts, the more people who can have an informed and educated opinion about us, no matter whether they are internal or externals to our organisation. Transparency prevents abuse of power, corruption and misinformation, and helps organisations to be more refined and detect flaws earlier thanks to more people checking the relevant information.

Furthermore, let's not forget that once every long while there is some case of money mishandling by treasurers, boards or CDs, as these positions have special access to resources. Adding a layer of transparency would help to minimise and better handle these isolated cases when they occur. Pretending that these incidents do not ever happen and dealing with them behind the doors it is just the opposite of what AEGEE fights against.

I am just being a responsible, active and democratic citizen within AEGEE. Do you remember the More Than Education ECI? I think it was a great initiative.

The ITC and HRC have no technical or human resources to implement these changes

This proposal requires no technical changes. It introduces the Format Content Guidelines ready to be followed by any body and individual who creates content in AEGEE (unlike many motions that ask AEGEE bodies for things but whose motion authors do not provide a clue about how to implement requested changes). It is not the responsibility of the ITC or the HRC to carry out the proposed changes. This proposal is about changing content management habits within AEGEE with the already existing tech infrastructure. It is not a technological change but a human behaviour one.

If we were in 1712 we would have the same dilemma about this DPPS with 3 levels of protection. And at the same time it could be solved without waiting 300 years for computers and the internet to exist. Though certainly having internet would be extremely useful since we could add dozens of memes to our papyrus presentations.

Do I have to learn HTML and JavaScript to publish content in AEGEE?

No. WordPress –the CMS used for aegee.org– or any other modern CMS have rich text editors that write the final HTML for you. It is the same as if you are using Google Docs or Microsoft Word, but with the advantage –among others– that you do not need to upload a PDF anywhere as content publication is done automatically when you click Publish.

Are antennas affected by this proposal?

No. The two measures introduced in this proposal do not affect data generated by antennas, only data generated by rest of AEGEE-Europe bodies.

Although nothing stops an antenna to start following them and get a nice boost on transparency and data organisation. We do it at AEGEE-London.

How changing some internal data generated by AEGEE to external is affected by the GDPR?

In nothing. GDPR is only concerned with personal data. The internal data that is moving to external barely contains personal data (usually name and AEGEE body, and I am not sure whether body can be considered personal data).

The GDPR always gives individuals the right to access, restrict or block the use of their personal data in AEGEE generated content no matter whether it is external, internal or confidential. For example, this includes documents of Mediation Commission decisions making personal references to any individual, even when these documents are confidential and not all of them are provided to the individual subject of the decision. It is done with the GDPR standardised procedure called Subject Access Request (SAR).

If you think that letting the names of AEGEEans participating during Agoras as external is a too big of a compromise (this is not asked on this proposal though), then we should start prohibiting participants from publishing thousands of pictures on Facebook and Instagram during events (which is actually the case for internal media but obviously impossible to enforce). Then The AEGEEan and The Golden Times should start using fictitious names on every interview with a disclaimer at the top saying Due to the AEGEE DPPS, real names of people appearing in this article are only available to AEGEE members.

I live in the People's Republic of Brexistan and I fear that I will be kicked in the arse if my government or employer finds out I am part of AEGEE

GDPR gives you the right to restrict or totally block the use of your personal data by AEGEE, no matter if it appears on external, internal or confidential content.

At the same time, for safety purposes, if you need to use a pseudonym in your content or a proxy person for the publication of it you should be allowed to do so.

I am happy with how Google Workspace works. Why do you want AEGEEans to stop using it?

No one wants to stop anyone using GW. Everyone will be able to carry on using GW in AEGEE as it is done now. The only difference is that with this proposal most AEGEE content will be available without the need of a GW or a MyAEGEE account, and final distributable content will be in HTML rather than PDF. In fact, this proposal has been written in a Google Docs file since it allows to easily leave feedback on the document.

If you do not want to use the GW account you just can ask someone to get you those internal documents you want

This is not only a cumbersome solution but –most importantly– it is not compliant with the current DPPS. If I ask someone to get these internal documents that means I would be accessing them without being authenticated or without even being a member, which is not in accordance with the DPPS, defeating its purpose.

This website looks alright

And it is available for anyone on GitHub. It also follows the AEGEE’s Visual Identity guidelines (with some liberties) for best integration with the rest of AEGEE websites. If you have a minimum knowledge of front-end web development it can easily be reused with little effort for any other proposal. It is a vanilla JavaScript, HTML and CSS static site with no dependencies on CMSs like WordPress or Wix. Simple and lightning fast to modify and deploy. Give it another proposal babe!

Chronology

This proposal has been around for a while:

May 2021, Spring Agora Online

The Agora at which the proposal was going to be introduced, it finally did not happen. The text was fully written and its website was online. But in the Online Voting System 🔒, in the section for proposals, I forgot to go through the second screen, which is only accessible after saving a draft of the proposal. I contacted the Juridical Commission (JC) as soon as the list of proposals was published and I saw that mine was missing. But since this happened 43 days before the Agora, and proposals must be in the system 45 days before, my proposal was not accepted. Rules are there to be followed. No exceptions!

December 2021, Autumn Agora Online

Second round. This time I was ready to deal with the dreadful Online Voting System GUI. So well before the 45-day Autumn Agora deadline I went through the two screens of the Online Voting System and sent the proposal successfully. Then contacted the JC for feedback as per the Working Format of the Agora 🔒.

It is here where the legal journey started. According to the DPPS, the only one who could modify the Levels of Protection of Data document as intended by my proposal was the Data Privacy Commission (DPC). But this commission was vacant at the time. I proposed then a small change to an article of the CIA’s DPPS so that anyone and not only the DPC could modify this document. The JC said that that change could be suggested, but before the Levels of Protection of Data document could be modified the change to the CIA’s article would have to be ratified by the Agora. The JC suggested that, in order to have both things happening in the same Agora, at the opening plenary I would have to ask for an exception to vote on the article change first thing, and then, if ratified, voting on the document changes. This was not feasible as this proposal is long and complex, and it specially relies on feedback from members. I just wanted to follow the conventional proposal procedure. For a second time, voting the proposal was not going to happen.

At this Agora, only the small change 🔒 to the CIA’s DPPS article was voted upon. The change was ratified by the Agora. And now, any ordinary member can propose modifications to the Levels of Protection of Data document. Yeih? 🙄

May 2022, Spring Agora Novi Sad

The proposal was finally presented at the Spring Agora Novi Sad 2022.

The vote however was not favourable. Both proposals were rejected and AEGEE and its members decided leaving the things as they were to carry on using PDFs protected by two accounts. Good luck!

Author

Tony is a 19-year old Swedish youngster raised in Brooklyn, New York. Born to a carpenter and a housewife, he had an eager early interest in healing by hands and water skiing. Eventually he became a motivational speaker, spiritual coach, serial entrepreneur, CEO of Apple and beauty tips influencer. He does not have a profile picture with a microphone on stage. But his hands are magic using Photoshop in those times when the ugly reality has to be retouched.

It also happens that he is member of AEGEE-London since 1978, Treasurer and IT Responsible of the antenna since 2016, and has attended all flavours of European events within AEGEE. The whole experience has been great so far, a terrific 2 out of 5 stars!

Feedback and suggestions

Do you have a suggestion about this proposal? Did you find a typo or grammar mistake? Did you find an irrefutable flaw in the hypothesis behind the proposal that totally invalidates it? Do you feel like writing some passive-aggressive comment? This is the place for it! No trigger-warnings required.

Your honest feedback is absolutely valuable for a refined and robust elaboration of this proposal. You can leave a comment on the Google Docs file of this proposal.

According to Article 2.5 Meeting and Convocation of the Working Format of the Agora:

Proposals concerning projects and regulations that are to be voted on by the Agora must be submitted to the Juridical Commission in two phases, first as a draft, including at least the idea and motivation, at least 45 days before the Agora, upon which they are published for collecting feedback. The final proposal shall be submitted at least one month before the Agora.

This proposal will be sent to the Juridical Commission on the Online Voting for Statutory Meetings platform before the due deadline for the AEGEE Spring Agora Novi Sad 2022.

ℹ️ Proposal version: 1.4
To see the history of changes visit the proposal's repository on GitHub.