The next two weeks will be crunch time for the 27 candidates hoping to be part of the European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker. From 29 September to 7 October they will face hearings at the European Parliament to assess their suitability. MEPs will then vote on 22 October on whether to approve the new European Commission as a whole.
Read on for a short guide about how to follow the hearings online and on social media.
How it works
For information on the how and the why of the hearings, read our recent blog.
Schedule
A detailed schedule stating who will be questioned and when can be found here.
Background
All the information on the hearings can be found here. Not only does it include the schedule, you will also find all related documents, the legal framework, explanation of the procedure and links to the parliamentary committees involved.
You can also find the CV and declaration of financial interests for each of the candidates.
Briefings
Briefings on each of the nominees can be found here: http://epthinktank.eu/2014/09/24/commissioner_hearings/
This page, prepared by the European Parliamentary Research Service, also includes briefings explaining how the hearings work, Parliament's role in the appointment of the Commission before 1995 and the role and the election of the president of the European Commission.
Hashtag
Use the #EPhearings2014 hashtag to follow the proceedings live on Twitter and Facebook as well as comment.
For live Twitter updates during the hearings you can either follow the Parliament's language accounts or the Twitter account of the committees involved with a specific hearing.
The updates will always be done in the language account of the candidate's native language. For English this is @Europarl_EN. A list of the other language accounts can be found here.
A full list of parliamentary committee accounts on Twitter can be found here. To check which committees are involved with a specific hearing, check here. The tweets on the committee accounts are always in English.
Twitter dashboard
A live Twitter dashboard allowing you to watch the hearings live, while keeping an eye on how Twitter users react, interact and comment can be found here.
Watch it live
All the hearings will be shown live in all of the EU's 24 official languages here (simply click on the name of the candidate whose hearing you want to follow).
Summaries of the hearings
Summaries of the hearings, including photos and tweets, will be available shortly after each hearing finishes here.
The photo shows Jean-Claude Juncker with the candidate commissioners.