Eastbook.eu – Portal on Eastern Partnership

is the main project of the Common Europe Foundation.

Eastbook.eu informs about the situation in the Eastern European countries and reports on development of the Union’s policy towards these states. Every month we expand our offer and the number of readers. We have built a website visited 40,000 times a month. We invested the obtained financial means – grants from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland and National Endowment for Democracy - in making the project more international, building our own editorial team of translators. In June 2011, we enriched the Eastbook.eu website with two additional language versions, becoming the only feature-information portal in Poland available to English and Russian speaking readers. In October 2012, we launched the Ukrainian-language version. Over 40% of visits to the portal are from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Azerbaijan, among others. In creating the four language versions, we cooperate with local experts, bloggers, NGOs and politicians, to present a whole spectrum of opinions. Our portal is among websites recommended by the EU Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy.

Contact:

Editorial board:  en.contact@eastbook.eu

The Warsaw-based Common Europe Foundation was established by graduate and post-graduate students from the Centre for East European Studies at the University of Warsaw – experts on Eastern Europe – in December 2010, though the Polish version of the website Eastbook.eu had been functioning since February 2010. Our goal is to shorten the distance between citizens and societies of Eastern Europe and the European Union. Our ambition is to initiate international debate on the future of the whole region. We aspire to make the experience of freedom of speech and shared one. As an efficient organisation and a modern medium, we earned the trust of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland, College of Eastern Europe and Ministry of the Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.

Open Eastbook.eu is carrying out the project together with:

Noticing the niche for medium providing free and impartial information about the state of affairs in EaP countries, we have launched Eastbook.eu, a website publishing articles from activists, politicians, bloggers, students, etc., in four language versions – English, Polish and Russian and Ukrainian. The effects of our work – comments from our readers, whose number is constantly growing, citations in other media and growing positive presence at regional events – have encouraged us to continue our efforts and open our portal even more to potential authors, giving them a modern web arena – an opportunity for self-publishing, enabling to post their blog entries more easily and interact with other authors.

In broad terms, the Open Eastbook project addresses two inextricably intertwined issues in the Eastern Partnership region – freedom of speech and development of civil societies. According to the Freedom House, each state participating in the EU’s EaP programme restricts independent media in various ways. The FH’s report published in 2012 labels Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus as “not free”, whereas Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine are in the category of “partly free” countries. The lack of unrestricted news circulation results in their citizens forced to seek information on the Internet – outside the sphere mightily influenced by state-controlled media of their countries.

The Open Eastbook Project aims to expand Eastbook.eu, a website targeting audiences manly from the European Union’s (EU) and Eastern Partnership’s (EaP) countries, into a regional blog portal exchanging information about Eastern European issues through: a) gathering and supporting authors researching issues regarding the EaP region, b) connecting netizens involved in promotion of democracy and freedom of speech, and c) publishing (incl. translation) in three languages – English, Polish and Russian – in order to remove language barriers dividing societies of Eastern and Western Europe.

Open Eastbook.eu project is carrying out thanks to the kind support of: