Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Help train the next generation of computer scientists
Monday, January 20, 2014
Developing computer science and STEM skills is something that should start at an early age. That’s why we’ve been supporting efforts like the
RISE Awards
and
Raspberry Pi
to help inspire a new generation of computer scientists who will build the apps and programs of the future. We are passionate about improving the way computer science is taught in schools and believe that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science.
We are pleased to announce that applications are now open for the
2014 Google CS4HS
(Computer Science for High School) award program. The program funds universities to work with local high schools to give teachers the training and tools they need to bring computer science and computational thinking into the classroom. Apply before midnight GMT, February 17th, 2014 via
www.cs4hs.com
.
Throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa, many high schools have limited access to training and curriculum resources. Teachers often struggle to keep up with fast changing technology and they have difficulty demonstrating that computer science can be a rewarding and “cool” career choice. The Google CS4HS award helps teachers meet those challenges. In 2013, the CS4HS program funded 34 computer science education projects
across 18 countries
in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
We’re excited to have the opportunity to help even more educators learn how to teach computer science and encourage students to take up computer science. Together, we can help inspire the next generation of computer scientists!
Posted by Posted by Michelle Finnegan, University Relations Specialist, UK
Honoring Irish casualties from World War I
Friday, January 10, 2014
During World War I, about 50,000 Irish soldiers died fighting in the British army. Until now, these records were located only in a book released in 1923 and published in a mere 100 copies. Google has worked with the Irish genealogical history and heritage company
Eneclann
and the
In Flanders Fields Museum
in Ypres, Belgium to build a
new Irish memorial website
, bringing a list of Irish war dead available online and making it searchable with
this simple tool
.
Today, Ireland’s Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade
Eamon Gilmore T.D.
, launched the new website with Northern Ireland First Minister
Peter Robinson
and deputy First Minister
Martin McGuinness
at our Dublin headquarters. “While the digitisation and online access to this record will be a rich resource for genealogy, most significant is its value in facilitating the simple and important act of remembering the individuals, Irish men and women, who lost their lives in the First World War,” Tánaiste Gilmore said.
The two Northern Irish leaders spoke movingly about the project. “My presence is a clear indication of the maturity in confronting history on this island. For many years, this as something that people were not prepared to talk about, to face up to, to acknowledge,” said deputy First Minister McGuinness. First Minister Peter Robinson agreed, saying: “As we enter an important decade of commemorations in both our countries, it is my hope that what has been established here today will keep alive the history and the stories of those who did not return from war.”
Deputy First Minister McGuiness
Work on the archive dates back to July 2012 when the Irish ambassador to Belgium, Éamonn Mac Aodha approached Google and In Flanders Fields Museum. During the research, the museum discovered that the records for Irish casualties of the First World War were neither fully correct nor complete. More records simply list France as place of death. Many probably instead died in Flanders - in all some 11,060 out of the 49,000 have now been identified as being killed or commemorated or buried in Belgium.
More than 100 guests attended today’s launch. These included family members who had researched relatives who died in World War One; members of the diplomatic corps; political representatives and historians and academics, and members of commemorative organisations. Our idea is to engage the public and increase knowledge about these casualties. If you find an ancestor or locate a long-lost relative in the list send, documents, pictures, letters or any other relevant information, email namenlijst@ieper.be. The information will be verified and added to the website.
The new Irish World War I records search tool
This event marks the opening of the ceremonies for the 100th year of the outbreak of World War I. We’re proud to play a part in this project as a sign of our commitment to Ireland, our European headquarters, and to using technology to fill in holes left by history.
Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa
Promoting transparency around Europe
Monday, December 30, 2013
When eight technology companies presented a plan this month to reform government surveillance, a key request concerned transparency. At Google, we were the first company to publish a
transparency report
detailing the requests we receive from governments around the world to bring down content or hand over information on users.
But Google’s report represents only a narrow snapshot. It is limited to a single company. Imagine instead if all the requests for information on Internet users and for takedowns of web content in a country could be published. This would give a much more effective picture of the state of Internet freedom. As the year draws to a close, we’re happy to report that
Panoptykon
, a Polish NGO, published this month a preliminary
Internet transparency report
for Poland and
Fores
, a Stockholm-based think tank, issued a
stud
y in Sweden.
In Poland and Sweden, we helped initiate these transparency efforts and supported them financially. NGOs in six other European countries are working on national transparency reports. Our Estonian-supported transparency coalition already published a
report
last spring. In addition, university researchers in Hong Kong moved ahead over the summer with their own
report
. In Strasbourg, the
Council of Europe
recently held an important conference on the subject and hopefully will move ahead to present a series of recommendations on transparency for its 47 members.
Each transparency campaign takes a different approach - we hope this process of experimentation will help all of us learn. The Estonian effort, titled Project 451, focuses on content removals, not government surveillance, because the authors believe this is the most important issue in their country. The name of Project “451″ refers to HTTP Status Code 451, defined as “unavailable for legal reasons” and the report found that many web platforms were taking legal content down due to fears of legal liability.
The new Polish and Swedish reports attempt to shed light on government requests for information on users. Fores contacted
339 Swedish authorities
and found that more than a third had requested data about users or takedowns of user-uploaded content. Panoptykon uncovered that Polish telcos received 1.76 million requests for user information in 2012, while Internet companies polled received approximately 7,500. In addition, Panoptykon discovered that many Polish government requests for information on users were based on a flawed or unclear legal basis.
Admittedly, both the Swedish and Polish reports remain incomplete. Not all Internet companies participated. Much relevant data must be missing. Like with our own Google report, we hope to continue filling in the holes in the future. Our aim is to see this campaign gather momentum because the bottom line is transparency is essential to a debate over government surveillance powers.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa
Supporting open government in New Europe
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
The “New Europe” countries that joined the European Union over the past decade are moving ahead fast to use the Internet to improve transparency and open government. We recently partnered with
Techsoup Global
to support online projects driving forward good governance in Romania, the Czech Republic, and most recently, in Slovakia.
Techsoup Global, in partnership with the
Slovak Center for Philanthropy
, recently held an exciting social-startups awards ceremony
Restart Slovakia 2013
in Bratislava. Slovakia’s Deputy Minister of Finance and Digital Champion
Peter Pellegrini
delivered keynote promoting Internet and Open Data and announced the winners of this year contest. Ambassadors from U.S., Israel and Romania and several distinguished Slovak NGOs also attended the ceremony.
Winning projects included:
Vzdy a vsade
- Always and Everywhere - a volunteer portal offering online and anonymous psychological advice to internet users via chat.
Nemlcme.sk
- a portal providing counsel for victims of sexual assaults.
Co robim
- an educational online library of job careers advising young people how to choose their career paths and dream jobs.
Mapa zlocinu
- an online map displaying various rates of criminality in different neighbourhoods.
Demagog.sk
- a platform focused on analyzing public statements of politicians and releasing information about politicians and truthfulness of their speeches in a user-friendly format.
An award ceremony highlight was a live concert by the
Diplomatic Immunity Band
. The combo (shown above at an earlier gig) includes US Ambassador Theodore Sedgwick on keyboard; Israeli ambassador Alexander Ben-Zvi on conga, Romanian Ambassador Florin Vodita on electric guitar, President of Institute of Public Affairs Grigorij Meseznikov on electro acoustic guitar, and the Banska Bystrica Mayor Peter Gogola on drums. We’re delighted they found the time to make sweet music in favor of open data and data-driven innovation.
Posted by Posted by Ondrej Socuvka, Policy Manager, Bratislava
Transparency Report: Government removal requests rise
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Cross-posted with
Official Google Blog
We
launched
the
Transparency Report
in 2010 to provide hard evidence of how laws and policies affect access to information online. Today, for the eighth time, we’re releasing new numbers showing
requests from governments to remove content
from our services. From January to June 2013, we received 3,846 government requests to remove 24,737 pieces of content—a 68 percent increase over the second half of 2012.
Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content. Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes. These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services. In this particular reporting period, we received 93 requests to take down government criticism and removed content in response to less than one third of them. Four of the requests were submitted as copyright claims.
You can read more about these requests in the
Notes
section of the Transparency Report. In addition, we saw a significant increase in the number of requests we received from two countries in the first half of 2013:
There was a sharp increase in requests from
Turkey
. We received 1,673 requests from Turkish authorities to remove content from our platforms, nearly a tenfold increase over the second half of last year. About two-thirds of the total requests—1,126 to be exact—called for the removal of 1,345 pieces of content related to alleged violations of
law 5651
.
Another place where we saw an increase was
Russia
, where there has been an uptick in requests since a
blacklist law
took effect last fall. We received 257 removal requests during this reporting period, which is more than double the number of requests we received throughout 2012.
While the information we present in our Transparency Report is certainly not a comprehensive view of censorship online, it does demonstrate a worrying upward trend in the number of government requests, and underscores the importance of transparency around the processes governing such requests. As we continue to add data, we hope it will become increasingly useful and informative in policy debates and decisions around the world.
Posted by Susan Infantino, Legal Director
Inspiring students about Poland’s great computing heritage
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Behind every computing breakthrough, there’s a story of the people who made it happen. Earlier this month, the spotlight shone on Poland’s computer pioneers with the launch of the educational project
“XYZ — The history of computing in Poland”
.
Led by the Center for Citizenship Education in collaboration with Google, the project seeks to raise awareness of Poland’s computing heroes among young people, as well as use them to illustrate the value of virtues such as ingenuity, curiosity and cooperation.
Materials produced so far include a timline,
online videos
, and
posters
highlighting key Poles and their achievements — from
Abraham Stern’s mechanical calculators
in the early 19th century, to
Leon Lukaszewicz’s XYZ computer
in 1958, to the team who built the
K-202, Poland’s first computer with integrated circuits
, in the 1970s. Coming soon are lesson plans and contests to make it easier for Polish educators to use these stories of local innovators to inspire their students.
The project was launched in fitting style at the University of Warsaw, where young innovators showcased their own work surrounded by posters of Polish computing heroes to dignitaries including
Vint Cerf
, one of the “fathers” of the Internet.
Students meet "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf
We’re proud to support this initiative and hope it helps inspire the next generation of Polish computer scientists to similarly great heights.
Posted by Marta Poslad, Senior Policy Analyst, Central and Eastern Europe
Joining Belgium and Finland around data centres
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
At first glance, it’s hard to think of two cultures more different than Belgium’s southern French speaking
Wallonia
and Finland’s southeastern lake region. Finland is rural, Nordic, and Lutheran, a place of big spaces, big forests, and big lakes. Belgium is urban, Latin and Roman Catholic, a place of crowded industrial landscapes, carefully cultivated fields and man-made canals.
Sunset at our data centre in Belgium
And yet, both are homes to
Google data centres
, and when our Finnish partners recently visited Belgium for two days of workshops, they found many things in common. Both regions built their economies on big traditional industries that are fast disappearing - paper and pulp in Finland, coal and steel in Belgium. Both have big neighbors - Russia and France. And both have a willpower to work with us to help jump, as our partners put it, “from the Industrial Heartland to the Internet age.”
It was a fruitful two day visit. The dozen-person Finnish team, lead by the regional development agency
Cursor
and
Aalto University
, told about their success in spawning video games startups and boosting online local tourism. The Belgian team, led by the local
Mundaneum Museum
spoke about plans to use the net for its upcoming 2015 celebration of the regional capital and hometown Mons as a European capital of culture.
We also compared common challenges - improving the two regions’ level of English and other skills needed to attract international business. Both regions aim to create web incubators and web startups, projects we are aim to support.
Over the past year, we have disbursed more than EUR1 million of grants to local organizations around the data centers. These fund a wide range of activities, from a Popmaton at
Mons’ Andy Warhol exhibit
to measuring water health in southeastern Finland’s rivers to supporting a computer science contest at the
University of Mons,
including exhibitions and talks on Internet issues and opportunities in both countries. It was gratifying to see our partners getting to know each other personally and pledging to work together to common goals. We have dug deep roots in these two different but similar regions and plan to continue planting deep roots in computer science, environment and empowering cultural institution.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Brussels
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