Talk:Directorate-General

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[edit] Collaboration suggestions

It is a bit typical that I will be unavailable for the next week or so now when the DGs have become the collaboration project. I will try to participate, but I cannot promise anything. As for the tasks that I had imagined, they would be something like this:

  1. Create stubs for all the DGs in line with Directorate-General of the Joint Research Centre, i.e.
    • Mission
    • Structure - including staff and management (commissioner and Director General).
    • Resources
  2. Create and expand the collective articles for EU General Services, Internal Services, and External Relations. This is a bit troublesome since their structure and purpose are not clear. The naming standard for these articles is not set either (as opposed to the DGs).
  3. Expand the individual DG articles. I do not think that we have to be very detailed when writing the individual DG articles. The DGs change from year to year and, for instance, structure on a Directorate level change quite frequently and thus probably does not need to be listed as in the DG Infso article. Heads of Unit are obviously not of interest either and Jesús Villasante should probably be deleted.

Remember that some articles might already exist and only have to be linked in on the collective articles, e.g.DG Translation

There is an old discussion about article naming etc. on the EU Wikiproject talkpage. --Drdan 10:13, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Role of Commissioner vs Director-General

I do not think that all DGs are headed by its own Commissioner, e.g. JRC which shares Comissioner with DG Research. What is the division of responsibility between the Director General and the Commissioner in the cases where both exists? --Drdan 13:44, 14 October 2005 (UTC) (Moved from top of page to this section) --LiniShu 03:13, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I'd also be interested in the answer to this question. For starters, I'm going to state what may be obvious to all of you Europeans, but is a new understanding to a non-European like me:
The Commissioners are the 25 (currently) Commissioners of the European Commission, one from each member state of the European Union, appointed by the member states in agreement with the President of the European Commission. The Commission is divided into departments known as Directorates-General (DG) that can be likened to government ministries. Each Directorate-General is supervised by a senior civil servant known as the Director-General, who reports directly to the Commissioner or Commissioners responsible for that policy area. (This all comes directly from the European Commission article.) So, we know from the above that the Director-Generals report to the Commissioners, but not much yet about division of responsibility. Also, I am curious about how the Director-Generals obtain their posts. Thanks to anyone who can explain more --LiniShu 03:27, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Good work Linishu! We needed someone to kickstart things! As for the Commissioner/Directorate General question: Officially the Director Generals and other senior civil servants are hired on a meritocratic basis, but there is a semi-official quota per country that also has an effect on the selection. The process is different from regular civil servants that have to go through a filtering process called the "concours" arranged by the European Personel Selection Office (EPSO) - BTW this years concours had 55.000 applicants to 300 civil servant positions [1]. "Senior management & advisory functions" (unit head and up) are selected by a panel of "experts and politicians". I have not been able to find the exact rules for their selection. As for the division of responsibility according to Understanding the European Union: A Concise Introduction (John McCormick, 2005, ISBN 1403944512) the Director Generals are responsble for running the DGs according to the policy set-up by the Commissioner and Parliament... but I am not sure how to interpret this. --Drdan 10:41, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Naming Conventions

I'd like to revisit the area of naming conventions, on a different topic, though, than the original discussion on EU Wikiproject talkpage. Directorate-General and Director-General are generic terms. They are also used by other political jurisdictions in addition to the European Commission. I did find a draft proposal Wikipedia:Naming conventions (government departments and ministers) described as "under consideration", that might apply.

In an attempt to be more precise, I've named the article about the DG-Agriculture, that I created today, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (European Commission). The names of the other articles created so far, are:

giving us three alternative forms, so far, thus:

  • <Name of DG>, no jurisdiction specified
  • <Name of DG> of the European Commission
  • <Name of DG> (European Commission)

I'm calling for some discussion leading to a consensus of which naming convention we should use. If we go with something different than my decision for the agriculture article, then I'll take responsibility for moving the article and fixing any links to it. Thanks, in advance, all, for your opinions! --LiniShu 04:40, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Ooops! I just created a couple of articles without first checking your post here. I think that the suggestion to add (European Commission) is good. Before reading this I renamed the articles for General Services from EU General Services to General Services in the European Commission, and the eqvivalent for the Internal Services. I suppose that that is in line with your suggestion. The (European Commission) still has to be added to the existing articles. --Drdan 10:20, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
That proposal to pre-disambiguate by putting (European Commission) in brackets makes a good argument. I agree that we should follow the suggestions it makes. I suggest we don't disambiguate anything with "Euro" in it, however. Talrias (t | e | c) 12:44, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Structure in template

Another question with regards to the naming standard. Since there are just too many DGs to list them all and since the official website list the DGs in a hierarchical way, I decided to do the same when I created the template. I have however now realised that this probably was not a good idea. The DGs currently collected by the External Relations page are just as relevant as the DGs listed directly on the template. The Services DGs on the other hand are not particularly relevant for the broader audience. Consequently, I am considering to redo the template using the three-group structure internal/external/services. This would add another five DGs to the template. Any thoughts? --Drdan 10:20, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] To do list created

I've made a novice attempt :) at a to do list for the EU DG articles, at Wikipedia:WikiProject European Union/DG to do. For those of us who like checking off items on a list, there is an area to keep track of articles to be created/ articles already created for the DGs. Please feel free to refine it. --LiniShu 05:13, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

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