Testing EdiT, the European Commission instance of LEOS

Interview with Milagros Calvo Vergez (DG TAXUD) and Veerle Cumps (Secretariat-General) by Commission en direct (CEND), the Commission’s internal online magazine

EdiT, the European Commission instance of LEOS that will replace LegisWrite, was recently tested in Directorate-General for Taxation and Custom Union (DG TAXUD). CEND and LEOS team spoke to one its first users, policy officer Milagros Calvo Vergez (DG TAXUD), and to Veerle Cumps (Secretariat-General), who supported and guided all the Directorate-Generals (DGs) involved in this test phase.

DG TAXUD tested EdiT, the new legislative editor, first. Why was that?
MCV: I had gone to the first presentations and trainings by the Secretariat-General, which leads this project, and I was convinced that EdiT - with its many user-friendly features - would be a very useful tool for us. In DG TAXUD we were just about to start drafting a legislative proposal, so the timing couldn't have been better! That's why I suggested it to my hierarchy and started the ball rolling…

  
What are your first impressions of EdiT?   
MCV: It's really a great tool for collaboration. It compiles all the comments for you, from all those involved. In our case we had the Legal Service, the editing unit of Directorate-General for Translation and the services in many other DGs – 18 DGs in total. There were around 600 annotations we had to go through, imagine wading through all the separate answers by the different DGs and collecting those annotations from a whole series of Word documents! I think our project had just about the right complexity to test the system.

VC: Actually, we had hoped for even more comments by the DGs, but I think DG TAXUD had prepared their project too well (laughs). It was my role to guide the DGs during the interservice consultation  phase in Decide, a workflow tool supporting the Commission decision-making process from planning to adoption – which is now interoperable with EdiT. As the two systems communicate with each other, the lead DG working on the legislative proposal gets all the observations, comments and suggestions posted through 'Decide Consultation' in one place, in EdiT.  

Besides the collaborative advantage, where does EdiT score more good points? 
MCV: I can't compare it with LegisWrite as I never used it, but an example of a very useful feature is the automatic link to Eur-Lex whenever you refer to a legal act in the text. You can also work simultaneously with others on the text, which makes discussing details with your colleagues easy, all the more so in these times of teleworking. 

And in our despair to produce a quality text under lot of time pressure, we also found some humour in the tool. With our colleagues we joked that we had better take care of our 'orphans', the name given to comments which are not linked to any part of the text. 

Of course, like any other new system, EdiT has its teething problems. The speed of the application could be improved, for instance, and when the drafting is assigned to several authors it's not always very clear to see who wrote which part of the text. At first, the 'accept' and 'reject' buttons also didn't always work, but the colleagues in DIGIT (Directorate-General for Informatics) were always ready to help, whatever the time constraint! And all the other hiccups we spotted are now on their 'to solve' priority list.
All in all, I was very happy to try out this editing tool, which will be the technology of the future.

VC: It is indeed very impressive to see how 'intelligent' the system is, that it knows which comments refer to which article, even if a DG reshuffles the structure of the text or the order of the articles. It's amazing to see how different DGs and different institutions even, can work on one document. It offers a lot of possibilities for interoperability. But as Milagros already mentioned, there are definitely some areas for improvement, and the system needs to be fine-tuned.

What else can you conclude from the pilot project in DG TAXUD?
VC: Drafting in EdiT went smoothly and was quite intuitive. Thanks to the tool drafters did not waste time on form and structure and could focus on the quality of the legal text. The interservice consultation process in EdiT and 'Decide’, the Commission’s corporate Decision-making system worked well with policy DGs.  TAXUD appreciated the easy consolidation of the annotations received. A big step forward for the drafters was also possibility for on-line collaboration between multiple document drafters and contributors working together on one document in a very transparent way.

So far, we've only tested EdiT with legislative proposals, but we soon want to try it for a 'proposal for a Council decision'. 
Next year, we plan to have not only the consultation step but the full Commission’s decision-making process linked to EdiT, and it's our aim to increase the different document types available in EdiT in the coming years. So, we still have a lot of ground to cover!