EU-OSHA Blog
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I would like to welcome you to the launch of the EU-OSHA blog, and explain why we have decided to take this step and how we hope that you can get involved.
From the very beginning of the Agency’s activities –back in 1996, when Internet access was far from widespread– we saw the World Wide Web as the fastest and most cost-effective channel for information dissemination. Not everyone believed that ‘this Web thing’ would go very far (we had to call it an “Experimental World Wide Web service”!), but we made every effort to turn it into an efficient communication channel.
That proved to be a good bet, and over the last decade we have built up the EU-OSHA website, adding a vast amount of content and new features – even winning some innovation awards along the way . We are very proud of what we have achieved despite our limited resources, although ensuring the currency of the information and improving access to it is a never-ending task.
Thinking back to 1996, I remember that online communication was very much one-way: only large organisations could afford to run a website, and they usually behaved as if they were the only content generators – seeing you, website users, as passive recipients of that content. I don’t have to tell you how much that has changed. Now almost anyone can publish anything they want, immediately and at minimal cost. New technologies also allow much easier and quicker two-way communication between organisations and their users or customers. On the positive side, this has brought about the greatest democratisation of knowledge ever seen in human history, which is crucial for a field such as ours, where so much depends on having the right information at the right time. It also allows us to share our expertise, quickly and cheaply, with people who need it most: in developing countries – more on that later, when I write my next posts.
However, this information explosion has a downside, too: how do we “erottaa jyvät akanoista”? (“separate the wheat from the chaff”, “séparer le bon grain de l'ivraie”, “die Spreu vom Weizen trennen”) How do we know what information, advice, opinions are correct? Which of the good practice solutions work? And how can we take advantage of technology to put the ‘distributed knowledge’ in our heads to good use? Part of the answer may come from the advent of the ‘social media’ and Web 2.0. We believe that these are not just buzzwords: just as we put our hopes on the WWW in the 1990s, we have plans to use these new technologies to help us find better ways of communicating with our audience, allowing you to exchange information with each other, and ‘filtering out the noise’ to make it easier to find quality-assured information. Keep an eye on this blog: we’ll tell you about our plans, and we’ll listen to your feedback.
From today, my staff and I will use this blog to bring you information which we hope you will find interesting and useful: news about developments in occupational safety and health across the EU and beyond, and also about EU-OSHA initiatives and activities to fulfil our mission.
Only you can make these new tools useful, so we hope that you will participate actively. We are one of the smallest EU agencies and cannot promise to reply to every comment, but we will read them and bear them in mind to shape our future work. We know very well that managing communication in 23 official languages isn’t always easy, so we’ll also try to get technological help to keep the conversation going, whatever language you speak:
Entä ne, jotka eivät lue englanninkielistä materiaalia. Kannattaa kokeilla Google käännöspalvelua.
What about those who do not read English-language material. Worth trying Google translation service.