Mathew Lowry

An EC-wide platform for supporting evidence-informed policymaking, K4P is considered "EUROPA best practice" in knowledge management and synthesis.

Role: Inception Manager Steered the inception of yet another online community of practice, but (like SmartCities, below) only the second to succeed despite lacking funding Calls to motivate Members.

Mapped out social and online media environment in several Member States, examining which platforms are hosting conversations on what policy areas, and who the influencers are. Transferred information to social media outreach experts placed in local offices.

Role: Website team lead, Information architect. The Energy Research Knowledge Centre (ERKC) is the European energy research web portal under the umbrella of the SET-Plan Information System SETIS.

Role: Project manager, Information architect, Launch Editor. Noteworthy for several reasons: - first site launched on the European Commission's new Drupal publishing platform, which was being piloted in parallel(!); - first to integrate legacy repositories (CORDIS, Newsroom) via web services and an integrated taxonomy; - first to integrate a DG-wide blogging platform into a policy-oriented site; - first use of automated semantic analysis (OpenCalais) to analyse legacy content via dedicated intranet.

Role: Technical team leader, Information architect, Content strategist, Launch Editor. A Drupal site to underpin the European Research Area in energy research - helping energy researchers and policy experts to understand Who is doing What in energy research across Europe, what their results are, etc. Under continuous development: future features will include federated and faceted search, and automated, multilingual semantic analysis of energy research database content from across Europe.

Role: Technical team leader, Information architect, Community designer, Launch Editor. Another Drupal-powered community of interest platform, this time for stakeholders interested in smartcities projects and policy. The first EU community to succeed despite lacking funding Calls to motivate Members.

Role: Project Manager, Strategist, Editor. A Programme-oriented online community, built using Drupal, with even less design and editorial budget than Edulink.

Role: Project Manager, Strategist, Editor. One of the Programme-oriented online community sites my team and I built using Drupal. No budget for design, as should be obvious! But a successful community nonetheless.

Role: Project Manager, Information Architect. First use of semantic technologies in an EC comms project. Migrated 5 years of magazine and news articles into Drupal, using OpenCalais to assign articles to themes and countries. Results: - new content interfaces (geographic and thematic) - 'recommended reading' widget providing cross-links to similar articles between content from different editions, using taxonomy matching.

Role: Project manager, Information architect, Content strategist, Launch editor. Plone-powered website to cover the EU's Strategic Energy Technologies Plan. Currently being migrated into Drupal.

Role: Launch Director, Editor. Launched Blogactiv.eu, the premier blogging platform in the Brussels Bubble.

Launched in October 2005 to support the EC's case for the Mobile Roaming Regulation, which was to become one of the EC's most popukar "success stories" for the subsequent 12 years and beyond. In an era where 'online support' to a policy initiative consisted of publishing the press release online, the 6-language roaming site allowed Europeans to explore the story and the data themselves. It allowed users to explore how roaming charges varied for people from each EU country visiting six other countries, while roaming on up to six different mobile operators, both in terms of being called and calling home, pre- and post-paid. The resulting website traffic crashed EUROPA, which apparently helped win the political argument to push ahead with the Roaming Regulation. We added sms and data in subsequent years.

Lead the SecGen-approved pilot project to build a thematic portal covering everything the EC did in the Information Society field. Developed an innovative information architecture, content strategy and organisational strategy to bring together an editorial board covering the work of 14 DGs. Led to many lessons learnt in architecting the EC's online presence, as well as the Newsroom application - the EC's first cross-silo content management system. More: http://mathew.blogactiv.eu/2009/09/06/so-farewell-thematic-portals-on-europa/

Developed for the EC’s first cross-silo, thematic portal, which covered the work of 14 different DGs and so involved cooperation among a decentralised network of around 100 editors and content providers across the EC. We developed Newsroom to help them internally share and externally publish time-dependent content and library items (news, events, funding opps, publications, speeches, videos, etc.). It also distributed them via multiple enewsletters and (another first) RSS and user-customised XML feeds. By 2005 the Newsroom had already been adopted by other DGs, probably the first time an online tool had been built by a “policy DG” and used elsewhere. By 2015 it was ‘corporatised’ it - available to the entire EC - and by 2017 it was being used by almost 2000 EC publishers, publishes into over 60 environments, and manages 600,000 subscribers of over 200 newsletters.

By 2009 I'd finally convinced one of ESN's clients (an EC research programme) to think in terms of managing a website with a 'best of' on paper, rather than publishing a magazine and then putting it on the internet. More: http://mathew.blogactiv.eu/2009/09/01/building-communities-with-event-in-a-box/

First iteration of the "Event in a Box" online concept: a website for developing an Community of Practice around an existing annual event, with features (personal profiles, proposals, comments, likes) which would be called "Web2.0" a couple of years later. Would be re-used scores of times for subsequent events.

Client: EUREKA (non-EC European research organisation) Site: www.eureka.be (relaunched many times since) Given a research group from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, we built a site which could do what the EC's equivalent (CORDIS) could not do before 2003: integrate a legacy database with other 'added value' content on their research projects.