Although the EU has contributed significantly to the realization of many new social rights across the member-states, European citizens  tend to attribute  progress to their own governments, charged with the actual implementation of Community law. As extensive scholarship on multi-level governance attests, however, European integration is not merely a "top-down" process. While EU organs play a significant role in "downloading" shared community values and binding operational concepts (e.g., equal treatment,  social inclusion/cohesion,  multiple discrimination), it  also affords  many opportunities for "uploading" benchmarks, indicators and best practices developed and tested within individual member states. Frequent reliance on Directives (mandating the community  ends but not the  national means of implementation) can nonetheless lead to a "reloading" of policies in ways that deviate from Community goals, resulting in problematic "unanticipated consequences" requiring further EU action. This panel offers  three a concrete examples, focusing on the activities of the European Anti-Poverty Network ("downloading"),  Angela Merkel's role in advancing EU energy/climate change policies ("uploading"), and the complicated approach to  corporate-board quotas and work-family  reconciliation policies in one national context, fractured by German federalism ("re-loading"), respectively.