The nominations include individuals, organisations or public bodies that have implemented ideas to debate European policies at national level and range from artistic performances to former politicians.
Nominees include the environmental film 'Home', a platform for European journalists, individual bloggers on EU affairs, a former Belgian prime minister, the European Youth Parliament, an Irish grassroots online debating forum, a Turkish association of women entrepreneurs, a Belarusian-European project team, and a foundation supporting French civil society.
The winners will be announced at a prestigious prize ceremony to be held at the European Parliament on 12 November. The announcement of the winners will be followed by a high-level debate on EU priorities among political leaders.
The debate will take place just weeks after Ireland's second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, scheduled for 2 October and taking place when new MEPs are expected to make their mark on EU communications policy.
In recent years, the European Commission has launched several initiatives to tackle the increasing lack of trust and interest of citizens in the EU project. Following the 2005 'Plan D' response to the institutional crisis, which arose from the 'no' votes against the draft EU constitution in France and the Netherlands, a White Paper on a European communication policy was launched in 2006. 'Debate Europe', the EU executive's most recent initiative, was launched in spring 2008 ahead of the European Parliament elections in 2009.
Despite these initiatives, turnout in this year's elections to the EU assembly was the lowest on record, at 43.4%, indicating that Europeans remain underwhelmed by EU affairs.
Pat Cox, a former president of the European Parliament and a member of the VIP jury that will select the EurActiv award winners, stressed that while large-scale national and local debate on European policies "is still in its infancy", a number of great initiatives to promote such debate exist across Europe.
"The EurActiv Awards will raise awareness of these actions and recognise the efforts made by individuals and organisations to get citizens involved in shaping the future European Union," Cox said.
Other Awards Jury members include European Commission Vice-President Günter Verheugen, MEPs and a number of think-tank, corporate and civil society leaders.
The awards and November's prize ceremony and debate are sponsored by EURid, which manages the Internet domain .eu, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and the Coca Cola Company. The International Herald Tribune and Thon Hotels have signed up as the event's first media and travel partners respectively.
EurActiv launched the awards on Europe Day (9 May) as part of a year of initiatives to celebrate its tenth anniversary and the fifth anniversary of its CrossLingual network of ten country portals.
Further nominations can be put forward through the EurActiv Awards Blog until 15 September in any of the following ten languages: Bulgarian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian and Turkish.
