We welcome new and old readers to CINEFOGO Newsletter no. 4. This issue highlights some results and events accomplished through the Network since May 2007. We also welcome all comments and opinions from readers.

The CINEFOGO Network of Excellence is now about half way through its lifetime of 4 years. A thorough documentation of the Network’s activities in the second year has been collected in the Second Year Activity Report. The end of the second year was marked by a Midterm Conference in June 2007 at Roskilde University in Denmark. The conference theme was ‘European Citizenship. Challences and Possibilities’, and it attracted many scholars, including PhD-students.

The overall management of the entire CINEFOGO project implied two meetings in the period: the Network Council, encompassing all national coordinators, joined in June this year, and the Network Management Board held its annual meeting in October.

Among the Spread of Excellence activities, the first TRANSAACT training course was given in September 2007. The training focused upon how to improve the skills of scholars in communicating social science to a broader audience, including the general public. - Another Spread of Excellence activity is the new web portal, named Student Corner, addressing the CINEFOGO related PhD-network.

The CINEFOGO Network produces an increasing amount of outcomes in the form of articles, reports, books, conferences, workshops etc. Extensive documentation can be found on the CINEFOGO website and in the Outcomes Database.

In the present issue of the Newsletter, the Dialogue and Debate section is devoted to the theme: ‘A European Public Sphere? A contested concept, worthwhile to examine. We present a brief essay by Martin Potůček The challenge of broadening the European Public Space, and an article by Michael Strange An Open-Ended European Public Sphere, in which the author relates to EU Vice President Walström’s essay on European Citizenship, that was brought in issue no. 3.

An article with the eye-catching headline “This experiment revealed Europe’s Public Sphere” was published in November 2007. The article contained a conversation with US scholar James Fishkin (cf. http://opendemocracy.net/blog/feed). It concerned the first EU-wide so-called deliberative poll arrangement, where 362 citizens from 27 European countries were invited for a weekend of policy debate in October. They discussed challenges and opportunities facing the European Union with balanced panels of experts and politicians, and went to the polls before and after the deliberations (cf. www.tomorrowseurope.eu).

Undoubtedly, such experiments can provide valuable knowledge of how citizens may participate in public decision-making. However, the public opinion formation process in the real world is a complex story, and there is a great leap from an experiment involving 362 citizens to a transboundary European Public Sphere in setting with 490 million inhabitants, divided as they are into 27 nation-states with different political history, cultural traditions, and language barriers. Europe's Public Sphere was revealed? Hardly.