Anyway, I got married three months ago, correctly, right? So, we had a couple of meetings before the wedding, in order to get points and details, to bring out all the stuff that he needed to do and I needed to do. And, you know, coincidentally, in one of the meetings, a topic of board press came up, and we were speaking about this website, and, you know, the first question that I asked him is, like, how many visitors do you have, right? And what he said really kind of struck me in a way, and he said, I have no idea. He had no idea how many visitors he had, unlike Randall Douglas in the past year. So, what I, of course, naturally said is, it's like, okay, you should just, you know, install Google Analytics. This is what most of us do when we launch our website. But come to think of it, the question itself, how many visitors do you have was wrong. And the suggestion of just installing Google Analytics was also wrong. So, today, in this talk, I'd like to present to you what I should really have told my wedding photographer, and I'm hoping to see this video on WorkerList.tv. So, who am I? Like Paul said, I'm Tomar Zaman. I'm from Slovenia. I'm a developer. Used to be a freelancer. I'm a project manager, and in general, I would say I solve problems.  Yeah, I found that Kodomo, basically, it's like Airbnb, or maybe even Tinder, a matchmaking service between people that require WordPress services and between people that offer WordPress services. So, that's what you do. On to the story. You've all seen this, right? I mean, who doesn't know what this screen is? Okay, no one. When Tom Fisher was raising the phone. Okay. So, you know what it is? And, Mendo, I'm going to shatter your dreams right now. It's just noise. It's nothing. The number of visitors means nothing. I'll elaborate on it, so we'll be thanks again after the talk. So, yes. Imagine having a store in a shopping mall or in a street, and people passing by looking at your store. This is not visitor counseling. It's just people that look at your content. And that's it. It doesn't give you the big picture. In fact, it doesn't give you any picture. You don't know who those people are. You don't know what these people do. You don't know anything. You get a number. For example, you install Jetpack. You get this nice graph of a visitor's content going up.  Well, it doesn't work like that. So, before I continue, I think it's worth establishing the single most important purpose of any and every website. And it's only one word. Would anybody like to guess or know this word? Exactly. This word is conversion. Every website's purpose is to convert. But don't convert in this kind of way, of course. So, what they really want to convert you in is convert a visitor to a paid customer. This is the event that the conversion occurs.  I need to also stress that it's not always about money. For example, in Mandela's case, of course, the people can't buy stuff that he writes about. So, his conversion goal would maybe be increasing Twitter followers, increasing Facebook friends, increasing subscribers that consume more content from him. So, the conversion goal may vary from business owner or a blogger to blogger, but it's always the same conversion. But everybody remember gas stations back in the old days? You remember your dad took you to the gas station? There were no shops at the gas station like 20 years ago, right?   Now, because the gas prices are regulated by the government, they couldn't increase their revenue. So, what most of the gas station companies did is they introduced these shops. So, now, not only you have to go to pay for the gas yourself, you also need to go inside the petrol station and go through these lanes of corridors before you finally get to the gas station to pay for your gas, right? And we think it's super annoying, but at the same time, we always grab a small hand bar or a small drink on our way to the gas station, right? So, they have been increasing conversion, they can be increasing revenue by allowing people to spend more. Now, imagine that a petrol station had an aisle that would go right to the gas station, but in front of the aisle, this aisle, there would be a huge box, right, or something, and it would prevent you from coming from entering, so between entering and getting to the gas station, so what you would do, eventually, you would be frustrated and you would leave. Now, when you think of it, I mean, imagine that on a gas station sounds pretty ridiculous, right? But how or why do we do it on our website then? We all are guilty of this thing. And let me tell you who the main bad guy of this story is. Wordpress, as a CMS. He's an ICMS, of course, he has issues, but so do I, I don't still let me talk here. So, there is one important question that we, as a community at large, fail to ask ourselves. And that is why. Why do I publish some piece of content? Why do I download and install a plugin? Why am I downloading Wordpress? Why do I watch a website? Because Simon Sinek, in his talk How Great Leaders Inspire Innovation, talks about this golden circle, right? And it's what most companies out there do. And this golden circle asks three questions, right? Why, what, sorry, what? Why how and what? And the order is usually like this. So first is the what. What we are doing. What do I want to do? Then it's how. What is the website of course? How Wordpress of course? Of why is a question that often goes unanswered. So Simon argues that the best companies out there invert this process. They start by asking themselves, their employees and their customers why, right? Who hasn't heard of Revolution Slider? Right? Why Revolution, not just Revolution Slider, Sliders are useless. The only reason they sell, if I could look at the Revolution Slider and I'm not trying to pick on those guys, is that the site owners feel important, feel happy, feel excited that something is moving. When it's proven times and times again that Sliders are useless, are worthless. They don't convert, they don't relay information. They are just there for the owner himself or herself to feel good about it. So when we're talking about the why, let's see how these two companies kind of approach this. Hopefully I'll manage to pick at least half of you right now. So I've learned from Samson, right? So when you, I mean, say something better, but if you start a Samson, it was always like this. You came to the shop, to the aisle with computers and you see this computer, the what, it has this processor, the how, so how they are building this computer, another computer, another tablet, another computer, and the lines were endless. You had like 50,000 Brazilian products that you could choose from. And that's the problem itself, but in contrast to what Apple does on the other hand, have you seen commercials by Apple, right? You've got Johnny and I, with his elder voice saying something like, because we feel you are a frequent, because we know you're a frequent traveler, because we know you're a busy man, because we know, so it's always the reason first and then how and then what comes last, right? So if you've seen any of the people see jobs back in the days, when people cook now, they always present the what last. So they introduce the problem first, why addresses the problem, and they finally get to like introducing the new super awesome MacBook Pro. So this is the difference. Good companies ask why first. And good developers should always ask why first. Even when your clients have issues or requests about certain features, make themselves ask why, or you ask them. So how do we make the noise that I introduced earlier on Google Analytics into something meaningful? So how do we make the picture clearer? Well, we start usually by introducing events. Now this talk is not very technical, but I want to show you just a small snippet. This is how easy it is to track events on your website. An event may be anything from the person visited your store is an event, on the venting button is an event, then venting a link to another site is an event. And every action they make is an event. So if we apply this knowledge to our store that I spoke of earlier, let's say we counted people which is like visitor count, and we'd say, okay, we have 1000 people and 5, over 1000 events of persons passing by. 50 people enter our store and 5 of them actually buy the product. Now we have a lot of meaningful data that we can extract useful information from. And this is what we call the funnel. You know what the funnel is, right? You've all seen it. Wendell has first-hand experience from U.S. here because of this. I'm just kidding. So yes, what the funnel really looks like is like this. So let's imagine an e-commerce funnel. We have a visitor that comes on the page, a visitor that adds a product and checks out, and yeah, we see it's a thank you. I'm just giving an example. But this is what the real funnel looks like. So now your visitor, you give perspective to your visitor to what they do, how many they check out. And you should always focus, when you look at the funnel for events, you should always focus on the ones that drop the most. That would usually be between the first and the second. So for example, you have somebody visiting your landing page which has a button, and only a small tiny percent clicks that button, but the majority of those actually see the path through, so they actually buy it. So you should add, you should focus at that point on the biggest drop-off. So improving the visibility of the button, improving the color of the button will get there. So yes, how do I improve the funnel? That's the question. And there are three ways to do that. The first one is writing 80 tests. Who here doesn't know what 80 tests are? Okay, cool. So the second part is awesome customer support. We'll get there. And the third one is improving user experience. Let's talk about 80 tests first. 80 tests, testing is a quite simple process of showing different variants of the same element to your visitor. For example, imagine a button. You can show, on the same page, you can actually show different button variants to the same, sorry, to audience, but it automatically splits. So if we have these four buttons on our landing page, 25% of visitors will see the first one, 25% the second, and 25% the third, and so forth. And this is not up to you to implement. It's actually very easy to implement and we'll get there as well. So have I introduced it clearly enough? Okay, thank you. And it's also important that you 80 test your volume. Headlines on any landing page is the most red piece of content your website has. When your visitors come on your website, the biggest header will be red first and pretty much by everyone. So when you start with 80 testing, I usually remind that we should all start with 80 testing the why. So it's not what we do that usually websites say we do this and this with this. Try making it work, maybe won't. Like why we do what we do. And here I have no affiliation with optimizing, but I really recommend them. You can try them out. Basically you don't need to do anything on your WordPress.  You implement it and then you do everything their way. And their pre-plan includes for majority of us for a long time. So it's good enough. I suggest you give it a try. They enable easy testing of elements, buttons, pictures, layouts, whatever you need. I don't know why the fight is here, I believe. Yeah, why the fight is here. So the next part is customer support. Good customer support. You not only create happy visitors, happy customers. You convert them well. You manually improve the funnel because people that speak to you person to person or through online chat will get more inclined to convert because it's easier than for you to talk them into purchasing. And for example we implemented one of these on our website and it converts crazy. So basically when they have any kind of pre-sale questions, they click the button, they ask a question, we give it to them, they usually hire one of our developers. So what you create with chatting live with your customers is in a way you get a message or tweet. And it's a huge win. And it works. And what's more important, they provide a lot of honest feedback that you want to hear. So always talk to your customers. I mean for us it's really easy to hide behind the screen but we need to realize it's a human being on the end or on the other end of the line. Yeah, the third part is user experience. User experience is a huge broad topic so almost that is very big. But user experience teaches us that it's not always about the numbers. It's easy to track people. It's easy to look at Google Analytics. It's easy to look to optimize. It's easy to look at the numbers and make sense of them. And we do make sense of them. So what that is, that is the quantitative part of user experience research. Qualitative on the other hand means that we have to visit our users, our readers, our consumers and tip next to them and look at what they're doing. So numbers are only half of the story, right? So once we... back in the day, we did a user testing session. It was our first. We met the user experience professional and he hiked us over to the office where we performed user experience sessions. And what it looked like was he found some people to test our website so to see how they interacted with our application. He gave them the scenario to follow. And I was sitting like that. They were just observing what they did. So the first person went to the app, the scenario went to the application, submitted the project brief and he came to the next page and he didn't know how to continue. And I was thinking to myself, what to do? But you're not allowed to say anything for the user environment. But over there, nothing, nothing. He abandoned the process. So I was like, what's wrong with this demo, right? The second one, the same story. The third one, the same story. But the bottom line, what I learned from this experience and it sticks with me to this day, I'd love to share with you, but it's not their fault that they don't find the button. It's our fault that we don't present it clearly enough. So you can have the fanciest coffee that you tested, micro coffee, so what the button says. You can have the fanciest, most expensive designer, but if you don't test with your users, this is what you get. So to recap, you should always try to first build some of the models and then improving it, or improving them by age testing, by providing awesome customer support and taking UX into huge consideration. Because anyone can publish stuff and set up WordPress. Anyone can use Google Analytics or Jetpack to track their visitors. Anyone can give you their business card, but it takes a real pro to convert visitors to customers. Are you that pro? Thank you.


We will be starting our second part of the second day of our plenary, welcome back to all of you. The next point on our agenda is the debate with the members of the Conference on the Future of Europe Plenary Working Group on European Democracy. During last week's meeting in Strasbourg I had the chance to meet and exchange with all of you and it is a great pleasure to welcome you today in our plenary. Unfortunately online because of the COVID measures and it is of course the pleasure of our members and of myself to welcome you today in the Committee of Regents. So let us start our debate, dear colleagues and dear delegates to the Conference on the Future of Europe as you very well know our delegation to the conference consists of regional and local politicians who come from all over Europe and who have different approaches of course ideas, hopes. This is the reflection of the diversity of our union after all yet there is a common denominator that binds all of us, our common goal to promote and strengthen democracy and this means consolidating the role of representative democracy at every level of government, local, regional, national, European and even propose new tools of participatory democracy in order to promote inclusion. If we want to build a stronger sense of belonging to the European project we need fully transparent actions and decisions. We need to build trust between elected representatives and the citizens, eliminating divisions and antagonisms, promoting concrete actions at the regional and local level to ensure participatory, proactive and functional democracy that delivers for the citizens. And for the local and regional authorities this means acting as close as possible to the citizens led by the principle of subsidiarity, assuring at the same time the principle of proportionality. This does not mean less Europe. It means more Europe with better governments so that we can make sure that every decision and every act directly improves the lives of the citizens in the places they live in. Dear colleagues, all democratically elected officials at every level of government have a mandate to deliver for the people according to their competencies. So this is not and must not be a struggle between members of the European Parliament, members of national parliaments and regional local councils. No, this is a call for better cooperation, a call for less bureaucracy and for more accountability and transparency. And the good news is that we do not need a treaty change to improve the governance of the European Union. Better inter-institutional cooperation and coordination can make a significant difference today in accordance to the present treaties. So the proposals set out by the Task Force on Subsidiarity a couple of years ago can also help us in our search for concrete and realistic solutions. To pave the way to better lawmaking. Dear colleagues, I sincerely hope that the working group on democracy will bring innovative ideas and make the conference on the future of Europe a useful tool for all our citizens and our Union's future. This conference is an opportunity to demonstrate the best of our Union, its ability to be open, transparent and hold a constant, constructive dialogue with all sectors of society. And above all, this conference needs to bring change to Europe. Because it is one thing to open the dialogue with the citizens, listen to their concerns and then not do anything. And it's a different thing after listening to their ideas and their proposals to act. The citizens expect from us action. So after we have listened, we have discussed, we have heard all of their proposals, anxieties, beliefs or disbeliefs, we need to act. So this conference on the future of Europe in order to be a success it needs to end somewhere and to bring a concrete result into action. Nevertheless, it must result in a true tangible change in the lives of people. It has to be the beginning of a permanent two-way dialogue, so that Europe listens to the people and finally brings solutions to their needs. Thank you very much. And I would like to now give the floor to our first speaker, Reynold Lopatka, who is a member of the Austrian Parliament and who I understand has his birthday today. So happy birthday, Mr. Lopatka, and thank you very much for being with us today. You have the floor. Thank you very much. I'm so sorry that I cannot see you, and I think you cannot see me, but I hope you can hear me. Yes, yes, we can hear you very well. Go ahead. Okay. I am here in Strasbourg because we have a meeting of the Council of Europe. And so I continue. Thank you very much for the invitation. You know, last Friday we had the plenary, and in the plenary of the conference of the future of Europe, we discussed in panel two European democracy. And here we had adopted the citizens' European democracy recommendations. It was a list of 39 recommendations, but unfortunately these recommendations have completely forgotten about the role of national and regional parliaments. I think it's a big mistake. Then as you mentioned before, the fundamental question is what do we need for a stronger Europe to begin with? Do you need democratic legitimacy? And of course, the direct involvement of the European citizens is important, but the European Commission, which is appointed, also needs the support of national parliaments and regional and local identities. And moreover, the democratic legitimacy of the whole EU system and the EU legislative process relies on the involvement and support of these sub-EU entities. For the national parliaments, this important function is enshrined as a fundamental principle of the EU in Article 10 of the EU Treaty. But however, what do we see? We are currently seeing an opposite development. The influence of national and regional parliamentarians has decreased year by year. I give you two examples which prove this. First example, we have more and more EU regulations and less and less EU directives. In the year 2000, we had 16 regulations. 2021, we had 73, a decrease here from 16 to 73. In the year 2000, we had 39 directives. Last year, we had only nine directives. It's going down dramatically. But only directives, unlike regulations, give national parliaments and regional legislative assemblies the chance to be fully involved as lawmakers in this procedure. This means that over the last 20 years, there was a silent but important transformation, weakening national and regional legislation and transferring power to Brussels. We see now four times more regulations. As I mentioned, from 16 to 73, a development that not only threatens the principle of subsidarity, it also causes more centralism and, in some parts, overregulation. I give you a second example. We observe the same upward trend in the number of delegated legal acts, which are not subject to subsidarity scrutiny by national parliaments. The number of delegated legal acts increased from 38 in 2012 to 185 in 2021. National parliaments have no chance here to intervene. We are not involved in this procedure. The new commission intervenes here in national politics with far-reaching consequences, without solid control of the added value of its actions. Last but not least, we should also mention that there has been a strong reduction of subsidarity complaints by national parliaments. This is a result because this warning system doesn't work as it should. You know, we have the chance with these recent opinions here to intervene, and the commission should take account of recent opinions. The problem is that this procedure doesn't work. We have, since 2013, when we had 90 such opinions, now a development which is not good. The number had dropped only to 16 in 2020 and 35 in 2021. The reason is simple. National parliaments have realized that this yellow card procedure doesn't work properly. So far, there were no direct effects on the outcome. And since the Lisbon Treaty, since 2009, we had only three times a so-called yellow card, and we had more than 500 of these complaints. Therefore, we should rethink this procedure. We need a new and more effective procedure. There, a whole new way of working was proposed when we had this high-level task force on subsidarity, proportionality, and doing less but more efficiently in 2018. And we asked for a green card, a late card. We also asked for a system speaking of one in and one out principle. But since then, what we have seen was that the EU commission didn't put the focus on more subsidarity. I think it would be absolutely necessary for the commission to take the conference on the future of Europe as an opportunity to put again subsidarity back at the center of attention. So what I want to say is I am glad to be able to speak here at the committee of the region, an institution that has always invested a great deal of energy in this important area and keeps doing so. I hope that it's possible that we not only look at the direct involvement of the citizens. It is important. But what we also need is a stronger and real involvement of national and regional and local representatives in the EU decision-making process. And I hope that together we can reach in this panel, in this group speaking and discussing European democracy, that we are more involved. Currently, we are not sufficiently involved in this legislative and policymaking process. We have to change it. And I hope that together the committee of the regions and we as national parliamentarians have the chance to bring the focus of the commission again on this issue of subsidarity to involve national and regional parliaments. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much, Mr. Lopatka and happy birthday again. I would like to give the floor now to Sandro Gozzi, the member of the European Parliament. Mr. Gozzi, you have the floor. Thank you. Thank you very much, President. I appreciate it very much this initiative. And I'm very glad that I can come back to express myself before the committee of the regions as I did more than once when I was in government in Italy. So thank you very much for your initiative. And to me, your presentation has identified the key issue that we have to address within the conference of the future of the union, talking about our work in the working group on democracy. Because the issue is how we manage to reorganize and strengthen the democracy and the link between political legitimacy and democracy within the European Union at all levels. And it is clear that we have to work around the three levels and the two dimensions, talking about democracy. The three levels are the local, local, regional, national, and European. The two dimensions of democracy are the representative democracy and the direct democracy. On the first issue, on the issue of the level, I think that we have to use, to exploit all the potential of the conference of the future of the union to strengthen the link between democracy and political legitimacy about European issues at all level of our governance. That means that we have certainly, at local level, better insert the voice of the region and local authorities, especially through the committee of the regions in the European decision making process of the union, and there are very good proposals that come on your side. For example, the issue of the parliament taking on, in its own initiative resolution, a proposal, a legislative proposal made by the committee of the regions to which the European Commission does an issue, a follow-up, is just one example. But I think that also we have to work around the issue of awareness and information and participation, because it is impossible to develop a strong democratic legitimacy for the European project at local level without working on awareness and information. From this perspective, for example, the good practice of the EU councilors who started in Saint-Homer, with me, Rodrigo Stair, who has been now already, I mean, they are a reality already in 1,300 towns, municipalities, and I know the committee of the region is working on that, to have, I mean, a legitimate member of a local council to be the reference and the animator around the debate at local level on Europe, it helps a lot. The democratic dimension through awareness, and this is the first level. The second level, of course, is the national level, and there we have to use a conference to try to Europeanize much more the role of the national political forces and the national debates, and we have certainly to push much more to have better debates at national level, especially when it comes to the time to take important decisions at European level and especially around the European elections. And that brings me to the third point, and the third point is how to break down the Chinese wall that there is today between EU institutions and politics and political legitimacy, because it is clear that the main problem that we have, and I think that we lost you, are you still with us? Yes, now, yes. Can you hear me? Okay, I don't know, I will start from the third level, I think that that Europe we lost you again, Mr. Gozzi, don't push the, please push the I did, I did, but I don't know why it goes down. Well, I will start again. At European level, we have to build up this transnational political and democratic space that is missing. I mean, and we feel it, especially we as members of the European Parliament, of course, we are legitimate, we are elected, we are elected in a, I mean, in a direct democratic vote all over the continent, but what is missing in Europe is a political dimension of politics. And this is the reason that we do not have truly legitimate European, transnational and political actors. And this is one of the most important proposals, a recommendation that have been made by the citizens about which some of us are working, are working, I've been working for a long time, citizens propose to directly vote the European political parties and to directly vote through the European political parties, half of the member of the European Parliament. It's clear that I mean, this is a very high number, but the fact that the citizens feel the need to ask for a direct vote of the European political parties indicates clearly that they feel that we have to strengthen the legitimacy of the European political parties and movement. There is a strong legitimacy of politics at local level. There is a national level. There isn't a, there isn't a European level because we cannot vote directly to the European political parties. And this is, you know that, I mean, this can be translated into reality, this wish, this recommendation of the citizens by introducing a transnational list and this is the work that we are doing in the European Parliament. Then there is, and I really feel that we have to fill this gap and build up this European political space. Then there is the other, the other two dimension of democracy to which you President, you are referring to. Direct democracy and representative democracy. I do believe that there is a synergy. There is a complementarity. I do believe that direct democracy as we are experiencing with difficulties, of course, the new exercise with the conference on the future of union can nurture and strengthen also representative democracy. And this is why we have to see how we can turn into permanent processes, some good practices and experiences of this conference. For example, this digital platform could turn into a permanent tool of direct participation and debate for the European citizens and dialogue between the citizens and European institutions. We also believe, and it will be my very last point, that the proposal of the citizens to create the citizens assemblies, to deliberate about the main choices and the annual work planning of the European institution can be something that we should work on. You know that we are already organizing, the Commission is already organizing at regional and national level this citizens dialogue. This is a dialogue could be transformed in sort of citizens assemblies. And for example, at the beginning of the term of the midterm of the European Parliament, we could organize this Europe wide consultation starting from the local and regional level. And this could also nurture all the pros and debate in the EU work planning, legislative planning, and the President of the Commission could also give answers to these citizens assemblies in the State of the Union speech which the President delivered each September. There is only one example of the innovation that we could introduce, not in competition with representative democracy, but why we must strengthen representative democracy. We could also be innovative on the other side. So these are my three points. Let's organize a better, the European debate in the three democratic levels that we have, local, regional, and national and European. Let's build up a truly European political space starting with the transnational list and let's also use the best practice that are emerging during this conference to promote new form of citizens direct participation. Thank you very much again for your kind invitation. Thank you very, very much, Mr. Goszi. I would like now to give the floor to Arnoldas Prankiewiczius, the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania. Do you have the floor? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for your invitation. Best regards from Vilnius. And I'm very, very happy to be a part of this clean recession of the Committee of the Regents and to greet you all. And indeed it is a very important occasion to discuss European democracy and the topic that is of particular, I would say, importance and popularity within the conference on the future of Europe. Last weekend, like many of you, like you, Mr. President and Mr. Goszi and others, I had a pleasure to participate in Strasbourg, both at the European Democracy Working Group and at the Clean Recession. And not surprisingly, those debates where I would say the most active dynamic and intriguing, especially on the democracy subject. And what really impressed me was the passion, the confidence, the knowledge that our citizens demonstrated who gathered to discuss those complicated issues in Strasbourg. The recommendations we looked at, 39 of them in total, are amazingly rich. Some ideas repeat long-lasting institutional debates, which all of us are fully aware. Some other ideas represent the need for better education and communication about the EU and its values, including awareness about disinformation. Citizens also call on us, representatives and institutions, to communicate more about what we are doing in a less bureaucratic and more understandable manner. Ideas and better inclusion of citizens to the decision-making process are also popular, whether it would be lowering voting age or introducing new platforms where citizens could themselves share ideas and new permanent bodies where they could also be as observers and broadcast relevant information about the EU. Last but not least, once that suggests the constant need to build and strengthen European identity by reducing language barriers, by including information about the EU, by also including European subjects into education system. Of course, it will not be possible to implement all of those ideas, but we must respect the essence of people's messages. And the essence is that our citizens do really care about protecting and strengthening common democratic values of Europe. Moreover, the late motif which I took from discussions with our citizens in Strasbourg is that we need to bring European Union closer to them. Therefore, I'm very happy that this discussion is organized by the Committee of the Regents, which indeed has a particularly important role to play in bridging Brussels and our citizens in bringing in a very important regional dimension. Allow me to share some of the impressions about the takeaways from the conference. I'm happy that citizens of the EU indeed see that the conference adheres to the great vision of ever closer Union among the peoples of Europe. Indeed, we see that there are a lot of greats and ambitious ideas on more integration, on strengthening of the European Parliament's role on issues from transnationalists to using qualified majority in many new areas. There are many suggestions that aim to make the European Union more effective, more united, indeed more democratic. And it is indeed important to have this long term vision, to have this European dream, to be motivated by it and to fight for it. You do need wings to fly, but also at the same time is no less important to stand firmly on your feet and to use your hands to build the future, picking one brick after another, and indeed to be more realistic. And here comes the role of executive power and of every member state and institution involved in decision-making. In this regard, let me make four points. First, citizens feel that the EU is decision-making and its decision implementation appears to be too slow. Furthermore, what we saw from the recommendations of our panel, there is a huge space for improvement in terms of citizens' inclusion into decision-making process. It is a question whether we really need a treaty change to make it better, or whether we can in fact use the existing legal tools to make our union function better. And I think the COVID-19 story is a very powerful one, when without a treaty change, the European Union and the Commission took historical steps to bring us all together and make us more united, whether through the historic joint procurement of vaccines or indeed through unique recovery and resilience package that is our pathway to the collective recovery into a new green and digital economy. I personally think that sometimes we do not use enough the full potential of existing institutions and existing treaties to make them more deliverable, to use all flexibilities available for us to have a more effective Europe. Also, secondly, I share the view that the EU should work much more closely with all levels, especially the regional level. Citizens express that the real life takes place where they live, local and regional level. The principles, therefore, of proportionality and subsidiarity that other speakers have referred to are extremely important to respect. In this regard, again, the citizens have many recommendations. They also call for new interactive, inclusive and easy to understand platforms so that we can indeed make them better heard. Third, the success strongly depends on implementation and sometimes enforcement of our common decisions. And the rule of law naturally is unquestionably important principles. It is through that sanctions and fines are sometimes unavoidable. But real success comes only when we work together – institutions, national governments and regional authorities – when we try to reach consensus and when we avoid the situation where we have to revert to the need of sanctions. And here again, the role of the European Commission is crucial as a guiding of the treaties and as a facilitator, interpreter and assistant in the implementation process. Lastly, fourth, citizens miss an effective link with Brussels at the political level. This has a strong impact on EU decisions as well. In this regard, we should fully employ all actors in place – national parliamentarians and governments, MEPs and committee of the region's representatives, absolutely the commissioners from the national individual member states and collectively as the commission – to bring Brussels debates and especially decisions closer to the citizens. Let's be frank. European communication is a responsibility of all of us collectively and individually. And here I fully agree with President Titi Kostas, Mr. President, what you have said that the crucial role of the million local and regional elected representatives across all Europe is very important in restoring people's trust in our democracy. You as regional and local representatives are the ones who have the best understanding of hopes and fears of our citizens in their daily lives. And finally, a few words about transparency. Also, the aspect which was brought many times in the cleanery and also in the digital platform and the working group, people are asking for more transparency, are asking for better communication. And here we have to make sure that as a result of this conference, EU is becoming more transparent and better accessible. So, ladies and gentlemen, once again, thank you for this invitation. I hope that we will find also new energy through this debate, how we can all build together a stronger Europe. And I look forward to an active and stimulating debate. Thank you very much, Minister. It's been a pleasure to have you here today with us. And the floor now to Webkekingma, the cofa delegate for the Netherlands. We are currently actually exploring a cooperation with Tilburg University on their project on European values in education, including their European values atlas to continue our work beyond the conference. So I think your presence here is very important, Mr. Kingman. You have the floor. Thank you, Mr. Tsitsikostas, for this invitation to speak at this very important meeting of the community for the regions. There are actually strong similarities between the contribution of the committee of the regions to the conference on the future of Europe and the Dutch approach to the conference. The Dutch government sees the conference as an opportunity to involve and question citizens. And that is why we have organized extensive citizens' consultations in a way that fits in our culture, in our public debate, taking into account three important elements, objectivity, representation, and inclusiveness. And the Dutch contribution to the conference consists of two parts, our citizens' dialogues, which were organized by an independent organization, and we questions more than 13,000 Dutch citizens about their ideas and opinions on the future of Europe. In addition, we also asked the Netherlands Institute for Social Research to update an already existing survey on what the Dutch public thinks and wants from Europe. And the Dutch consultations or the results of our consultations have been completed and the results have been shared with Parliament and with the conference. So what is coming out of all the Dutch consultations? The general picture is that the Dutch support the EU membership, but at the same time are critical about its costs, about more competences to Brussels, and our citizens wish for more transparency. And the three main topics of which the Dutch think that the EU should act are climate change, security and the rule of law, and migration and refugees. Since today's session focuses on strengthening democracy in the EU, I would like to take a closer look at the results on that topic. The Dutch do not want to know everything about the EU, but they do want more transparency and more insight. They also believe that the EU should enter into a dialogue with citizens more often and preferably on a permanent basis. And the majority of the Dutch consider European democracy an important theme and believe that the EU should make advancements. The specific recommendations include providing a broader perspective on Europe. We feel that when the media address Europe, the day is often done in a negative way in the Netherlands and in crisis situations, and the citizens feel that they don't hear enough about the day-to-day decision making. They indicate that they don't need to know everything, but in order to form a good opinion, they would like to have a better overall picture. For instance, they would like to be better informed about perspectives in other member states. The media and education can play an important role in this field, but the media must continue to be able to make their own choices because we very much feel that press freedom is very important in our democracy. Then our citizens ask for new and lasting ways to listen to them. The majority of the Dutch think that the EU does not know enough about what's going on in society. And to improve this, the EU should engage in more frequent and preferably permanent dialogue with its citizens. Many Dutch people consider our conference, the conference on the future of Europe, a very good initiative. According to some, referenda can also be a valuable instrument, but not all citizens in the Netherlands agree on this. For some themes, they feel specialist knowledge is needed and their referenda become a bit more complicated. Then they would like to have more transparency and clarity about decisions. They think that Europe is quite complicated and they want the EU to become more transparent and to make it easier to stay informed. They find that the official channels too often are very difficult and too complicated to understand. And every citizen has different interests and different needs and it should be more easy to find the information about the topics that interest you. For instance, young people are very often very interested in Europe, but very little can be found on Europe on the social media that they use. Then they would like to make the decision making faster. We find it difficult to understand how European democracy works and the decision making seems to go very slowly, oftentimes. In European elections, Mr. Gosier has spoken about it already, we mainly see partnerships of national parties and perhaps there are other ways of dealing with European interests. About a third of the Dutch think that you should be able to vote for foreign candidates in EP elections. About the same number, however, of the Dutch people does not agree. The most important that they find is that the different interests are sufficiently taken into account. And that at the same time, and it is very difficult, decisions can be made faster compared to how it's currently done. Next to the explicit wish of citizens for more information and transparency, the Dutch government has also launched the Transparency Pledge together with Germany and Denmark to promote the importance of transparency as an issue in the Conference on the Future of Europe and to collect new ideas and wishes from the population to shape a new transparency agenda. It allows people to understand and follow how decisions are taken, which policies are formulated, and how their interests are taken into accounts. All member states, including three European commissioners, 1550 members of the European Parliament and the European Ombudsman have signed the pledge demonstrating that the demand for more transparency is a widely supported initiative. I'm almost finished, Mr Chairman. Besides the recommendation as an outcome, the process itself of the Conference on the Future of Europe is also an outcome. This is a new way of involving our citizens. We have not done anything like before. Just a few points regarding the process that will affect and determine its success. It is highly important that the recommendations in the final report reflect the wishes and ideas of the citizens. After all, this is a bottom-up process in which citizens and their input are central. In addition, it's equally important that the report contains concrete recommendations which are feasible, and the EU institutions should be able to follow up on them. It is important to show the citizens that their ideas and their opinions are being acted upon and Europe delivers. Without it, the conference would undermine the public support for the EU, and that is the last thing that we want. In addition, I think it would be a good idea to look back on the process afterwards and see what we can take forward as best practices to increase citizens' participation in the EU. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. I would now give the floor to our members. I would suggest that we start with Orgid Geblevich from the EPP for four minutes. You have the floor. Okay. Mr Bok. Thank you, Mr President. It's a pleasure. Dear colleagues, members of the Working Group Democracy, it is a pleasure to have you with us and debate openly on the way forward to European Democracy. I would like to thank you for your meaningful proposals, both in the conference plenary and here also in the plenary session. I can assure you that European regions and cities would like to see not only a more democratic European Union, but also more European policies which deliver to citizens. We believe that democratic and representative democracy together with participatory democracy are complementary and you have found successful formulas for practicing them in our regions. This is a huge asset of citizens' trust, regional expertise and political responsibility which we bring to the table of the conference. This is also the source of our proposals for making EU decision making even more democratic, accountable and transparent. I would like to name just a few of the proposals. We propose that the existing early warning mechanism in which national and regional parliament are engaged is given real chances to work. This means extending the deadline for subsidiarity scrutiny. Another proposal. We will propose to boost parliamentary democracy in the EU by the creation of a green card procedure which to allow significant member of national or regional parliaments to propose EU legislation. Last but not least, let me remind you that during the conference the region and cities have organized the majority of the 5000 citizens dialogue. We should use this asset and create permanent mechanism for dialogue with citizens which is placed based. Instead of speaking about national issues on the European elections, I believe that will be better of discussing with citizens the territorial impact of the EU policies in such a mechanism. Dear colleagues, this conference is first of all about democracy and the European way of life. If we have democracy, we have everything. If not, we have nothing. So in this context, I do believe that we need to strengthen the role of the local and regional authorities in our union. In the end, all democracy is local. A stronger role of local and regional authorities and regional parliaments means a stronger voice of European citizens. The local level set the example for the national level since opinion pools consistently show that local elected representatives inspire high levels of trust among citizens. So in the end, I do consider that the Committee of the Region current position within the European Union's institutions no longer reflects the political importance of local and regional authorities in the European integration policies. And I think that the Committee of the Region should be gradually upgraded from an advisory body to a co-deciding body of the European Union on the policies with a territorial impact. That's all I want to say to your colleagues and thank you so much for your attention. Thank you Prime Minister, the floor now to Monsieur Rouguant from the PIS. Nous souffrons de passer d'Europe et non pas de trop d'Europe. Plus d'Europe, c'est la voie de l'avenir. Mais plus d'Europe doit s'accompagner de plus de démocratie européenne. Premièrement, il faut repenser nos règles concernant l'unanimité qui rend la prise de décision dans certains domain comme l'accession, par exemple, extrêmement difficile. Deuxièmement, selon les données Eurostat, il y a 13,3 millions de citoyens d'un pays de l'Union européenne qui vivent dans un autre état membre. C'est pourquoi la famille socialiste est favorable à des listes transnationales pour les prochaines élections européennes. Enfin, l'Union européenne est souvent perçue comme orsole. Pour ancrer l'Europe et reconnecter l'Europe avec ses citoyens, il faut affirmer la place du comité européen des régions comme Assemblée politique. Assumons l'ambition d'une assemblée législative européenne qui fera entendre la voie des territoires. N'ayons pas non plus de tabou et de fausse pudeur. La révision des traités sera indispensable pour réussir le sceau démocratique d'une Europe plus forte, plus efficace, plus intégrée et donc plus respectée. Merci d'avoir attention. Thank you very much. Miss Tuto, please. Thank you very much for the floor, Mr President, your colleagues. I think I'll give you a different view. I read all the citizens' recommendations. I've been in the panel. I went through the report from the digital platform. And what I've seen there, it doesn't reflect on my reality for being a local politician for 20 years. There is like a very, very little engagement in the digital platform. We absolutely miss women from the digital platform. We have really, really small frax citizens who actually contributed. I deputy mayor of Budapest. We are absolutely pro participation. We are doing a lot. I've been personally engaged in power and more citizens engaged in this process. I try to engage a lot of colleagues, mayors, local mayors to engage in this process, in the digital platform to add in their ideas. And I failed. So what I see is participation is a thing we are committed to, but we have to build it up from the bottom up. We do it with participatory budgets in Budapest, with these citizens' assemblies, but it doesn't come from one day to another. It's a very, very long process. There's a lot of ambition shown in the recommendations, but we all know that there are already a lot of things happening, a lot of changes happening. And my reality is I'm responsible for transport, waste, water, climate change, that it's not so easy for citizens to digest so many changes. Yes, there is a small group of citizens who always push for more, but there is a silent majority who need time to adapt. So yes, we have to build it, but to move to the citizens of Europe, it has to be for us. It won't work otherwise. Thank you. Thank you. Monsieur Décoster from Renew Europe, please. Ehberia, with EPR, like all the members of the Committee des Régions, who participate in the conference on the future of Europe, we are marked by plenary meetings that take place in Strasbourg and with the other orators of my group, Dietmar Brokess or Tobias Gotthard, we will try to express it. We have heard an impatience from the citizens, an impatience from European citizens who are attached to democracy. Democracy is born in Europe. The European project is also born precisely from this will to affirm democracy on our continent. And today, the proposals, the recommendations of the citizens must really guide us in what we are going to push next to our own proposals. I have, in particular, a lot of interest in the recommendations 24, 27, 29, 32 or 37, which require more education on European democracy, more interaction between European levels and citizens, which require more participation of European citizens. Finally, the high-level group, presided by Hermann von Rumpöy, translates well by putting forward, as our resolution does, three dimensions of this European democracy, the European level, the national level, the local level. We can do even better on each of these dimensions. The transnational lists that are dear to Sandro Gotzik, I thank him for his participation on our side, at our events, not only this afternoon, but on other occasions, are an element of this nature. We must also strengthen our relations with European parliamentarians. I believe that some who are elected on national lists can be more in the territories next to the members of the regional committee. And once again, Sandro Gotzik, he did it again a few days ago with us. We have expressed a lot of ideas on the subsidiarity in the task force, on the subsidiarity that has made its relationship, here it is already, more than three years. I think it must be an essential contribution with all these proposals for the conference on the future of Europe. And we can see it well, the regional committee organizes itself to be able to take this approach, be it the European correspondents, the European Union advisers. I believe that the regional committee should make sure that there is an animation by the members elected by the regional committee, a political animation to be able to do it. I believe that we still have in those who represent our daily life, to contribute to the animation of this European democracy and in the construction of the norm through our lives as well. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr De Coster. Mr Giampetti from the ECR now. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you Mr Van Loewe from the EA Group, please. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. For health, the European Union must take into account its strong motto, namely unity in diversity, by focusing on the active subsidiarity, as well as the resolution of our European Committee on the Regions has been made. This is how we ensure that the decisions can be made close to the citizen, for example at the regional or local level. As it has been said to the citizen, it is local and regional politicians here in the Committee who know what is going on with the people. And then we also have to strengthen the role of national and, of course, regional parliaments and become involved in the European decision-making, to wake up about the subsidiarity. And so I look forward to the introduction of a green card to support legislative initiatives, but also for a red card to support European initiatives as much as possible. And such a message is something that the citizen needs, something concrete, something tangible. And that is also the impact search of the Flemish Parliament, which we will work on next week in an event. We must think about the same reflection about the European Union, to get a better Europe. I thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Hasler from the Greens. I would like to make it clear that the citizens and citizens wish for a more commercial European Union. And I would like to give four very concrete examples from our citizens' dialogues here. A stronger will education in the EU for an effective voice in the world, about with more decisions in the joint foreign and security policy. A further development of the institutional role of the EU also explicitly with a change of the EU right of choice. Thirdly, a stronger and lower-priced public work of the EU, for example, with an online platform. And fourthly, more participation formats. About the future conference, for specific questions, for example, by citizens with randomly selected European citizens and citizens. I think we should take this feedback from the citizens and citizens seriously and now also strive for real structural reforms. Therefore, it is important that in the final document I will also find the instructions of the citizens and citizens. I am very happy that our closing application today takes on many of these important instructions, especially the participative elements. After all, it is very important to me that we clearly clarify how the process of success will look at the future conference and how its recommendations can then be specifically implemented. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Fernandez Viagna, please, from Renew Europe. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Dear colleagues, in November 2011 I organized a debate in the University of Cantabria organized by young people from Cantabria. A dialogue with specialists in the matter they made in their voice, expressed their expectations and reflected on the European democracy, the values that assist the Union and the spaces of freedom, of justice and security in the final stages. Allow me to share some ideas that are in the document of conclusions that we will take to the conference of the European future. The first is to note the Union of Supplementary Resources aimed at the objectives of sustainable, sustainable and supervised development by the Parliament. The second, to recognize the importance of the right to information, will be the third, the need for ambitious reforms that guarantee the promotion and protection of European values. And the last, the response of the Union on the principle that proclamates the constitutional traditions of the United States, requires to deepen democracy in all the United States, local, national and European, in the taking of political decisions. I conclude, Mr. President, by saying that the conference on the future of Europe is a German exercise of reflection and participation that will last for a long time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. Brokes, please, from the Renew Europe Group. Ms. Marinova, from the EPP Group, please. Dear colleagues, thank you, Mr. President. I am talking about the creation of new models for dialogue and discussion of the citizens at the European Union, with the full support of the representative of democracy. In fact, at present, we have enough opportunities today. We also rely on experience and knowledge. In my community, we use the Internet Platform to cover the maximum number of citizens. Through it, not only is the current information provided, but this is also an interactive opportunity for the implementation of local initiatives to deal with specific problems in society. In this regard, I have no doubt that we can help to reduce the gap between the European institutions and the citizens. It is clear that we have one goal, to make the European institutions more effective and transparent, which are the citizens in the center. The principle of partnership and the model of multistage management can be significantly improved for the better communication of the goals and results of the European Union policy. I hope that the European institutions will appreciate our constructive contribution and that they will measure their research during the conference. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Mr. Birbas now, please, from the PS Group. Mr. Birbas, please. Yes, yes. Ladies and gentlemen, and I would like to emphasize that I am very sorry because I am in quarantine and I cannot speak very well. I would like to emphasize, and I, with my time and I wish good continuation and success in the efforts of our team, it has become clear and through the implementation of this in the small with the European citizens that the big problems of the participation of the citizens of the disappearance and the big democratic problem that we are describing in all decisions are a reality for Europe. I think that our vote is moving in a very good direction and we will have to cooperate with the citizens because it is moving at a distance from them and to give results in the future. I emphasize two things only, that it is extremely important to move forward especially the development of democracy and that for this purpose, without any effort, and the basic work of the beginning of many levels of government cannot be done by Europe. I agree completely with the previous colleagues who agreed that the economic power and the capabilities of the citizens should be given with the use of the digital media and the platform, so that they can express it and they can work with confidence in all of Europe. Thank you very much Dimitri and I wish you all the best and I wish you all the best and soon to return to your old self. Thank you very much. The floor now to Alcina Iburges from the EA Group. Mr. Frey from the Greens, please. Mr. Frey from the Greens, please. Thank you very much Mr. Gotthard from the Green New Europe. Thank you very much Dimitri. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Mr. Pettersen from the PES Group.  Thank you very much. It goes on to the resolution that we have some changes to make because we think that it is a good resolution that there are some things we are unequal in and that is that we do not first mean that the regional administration should have a role as a determined institution that stands in it because if we become a real other in the process then it will become more complicated and the European Parliament will also have the same role and the other means is that the EU should not have more conditions in the health area that also stands in the resolution our health system in the EU is quite different and the difference we should all be about. The current EU law is strictly for the Middle East countries to make the decision when it is an event that we have seen that the European soil for social rights should not be a real way that it stands but we should stick to it as principles and not change to a set of rules and regulations. So that was our Danish delegation. Thank you very much. Alcina Iburges please from the EA group are you available now? Okay. So welcome the Government of Catalonia has wanted to take part in the conference on the future of Europe and we have wanted to do so as we are completely committed to democratic values, human rights and respect for minorities. We have done two different activities for a more beyond this multi-language digital platform it has designed an online survey because the citizens could share their concerns and organize a series of round tables in particular 8 for the entire Catalan territory to deal with all the topics that have been put on the table in the framework of the conference on the future of Europe as well as make two important topics for us. First of all, the officiality of the Catalan the European institutions as it is the most spoken trans-language and also the need that we understand that there is that the European Union and its position on the right to self-determination and the consequence of internal expansion. In this sense this conference has been a good opportunity to show that the future is Europe and that Europe has to listen to us. Thank you very much. Thank you. So, dear colleagues dear guests I would like to thank you all for being here with us and for your participation and contribution today. It is true that only together we can ensure the success of this conference and the added value, especially the added value for our citizens. So, again, thanks to all of our guests and our members who have participated in this discussion, very important discussion. I will now pass the floor to someone you know very well our former president President Marco Marcula who was so kind to accept my proposal to chair the rest of the evening because I have some very important bilaterals to attend to. So, Marco will be chairing the meeting from now on for a resolution and some opinions and also, of course, for the voting slots, the one that was cancelled early and postponed earlier and the one that we have later on. So, without further do I would like to give you the floor Marco for chairing our second day of the Plenary session and I really want to thank you and all of our members for being so active and participating in this very important today session that we had Plenary session. Thank you very much.