EC eInclusion subgroup meeting, Limassol, Cyprus

[Ian Clifford]

This was an excellent opportunity for us to reach out to the member states who attended (about 20 or so) to recruit new members to the network, and by chance they happened to be many of the ones we dont have representation in! So hopefully the number of member organisations will go up over the next few weeks, but also the geographic coverage will also extend (something that was proving very stubborn to shift; we were getting lots of new members but mainly from the same countries, or from outside of Europe)). We were invited by the Commission to present our thoughts on the strategic direction of travel for eInclusion 2010-15. We collated a paper for them, which I sent through in advance and which I presented to them in a shortened format. It went down well, and I do hope that some of it may appear in the output of the meeting, the "Limassol Report", which I hope will be circulated in the next few weeks.

I also had the opportunity to give them a quick overview of the network, but there was much pressure on this and I had to cut it right down. I also had a number of opportunities to have one to one sessions with the Commission people and individual member states representatives, where I had much more time to tell them all about our progress and the support we are getting from Microsoft and Telecentre.org.

It was also a very auspicious date.... 6th April. It was exactly one year on from Riga! What a huge ammount has happened in this year. I can only think of all the stuff that has happened since Vienna, but that includes developing and submitting the Grundtvig application, establishing the newsletter, attending the eParticpation event in Brussels (with web reporters from Romania), developing the eSkills Manifesto, developing the Exchange visits scheme, the the EC eInclusion consultation response and presentations in Cyprus, continuing to reach out to new members (which is now(unbelievably) almost double what it was just before Vienna(!)), and finally, finally, further developing plans for the next network event.....(and I have probably forgotten something important as well)....