Workshop in Brussels
Posted October 9th, 2007 by NEILLJ
Todays Workshop at The European Week of Regions and Cities is an opportunity to explain further the concepts of innovation and mainstreaming developed through EQUAL into the new ESF Programmes.
Of course all of the EQUAL Themes in one way or another have been incorporated in the new ESF Programmes and we in Northern Ireland believe this will provide an excellent platform for future Innovation and Mainstreaming.
Gender Mainstreaming is important in the Northern Ireland Community. We have two EQUAL gender mainstreaming projects. One bringing men into the non-traditional caring profession and another bringing women into non-traditional council jobs, such as BUS drivers and Collection. I shall talk more about these examples at the Workshop.
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Comments
Action Point
John, your action point was to keep blogging and commenting about your topic!
Communications
I understand one Action Point from our last meeting during the Open Days week is to continue communicating by blog.
We agreed this is more effective than by e-mail as it is less formal and does not demand a reply. It also allows us to dip in and out of the conversations going on between our group.
With that in mind I have just noticed a blog from Madalena. Madalena has raised the important issue of resources which is affecting us all at the minute now that the new programmes are starting and there are many other groups holding Exchange Events and Policy Forums.
This point of resources really affects time and staff. Mostly funding is not the big problem. That was why I thought the SKYPE system would be worth looking at again. It had been rejected before on the grounds of security but Jenny mentioned another CoP using SKYPE. Jenny mentioned a way to overcome the security issue which I think we should look at closely.
Another issue for our December meeting. Are the facilitators still actively looking at tools in our Member States? I am not clear whether their remit has changed. Ideally if they are still looking at tools some of these could be looked at in December and then put into our "product log" and some mentioned in the Newsletter.
Another item to discus in December is how serious are we about continuing the CoP into the new programme? Personally I think we should and we have a good platform to take forward but what do others think?
John
Open Days comment
Dear all
Well I thought we had a very interesting discussion at the Open Day Workshop on 9th. The comments from the panel were based firmly on our own experiences and contained some really practical advice which would be well worth documenting.
As is very often the case stimulating audience participation proved difficult. I don't know whether this was because it was the end of a long day or whether we silenced them all by too many facts.
It's a hard balance to strike. I think the panel idea is good but perhaps to start things off we need a number of people primed to ask questions to get the ball rolling. Although in the end we didn't do any presentations I think everyone had their one or two slides prepared. On balance a series of five or so presentations would proably have been overkill.
Can I just say as I was walking up to get the Metro at Schuman after the Workshop I was passed by two men discussing the last workshops they had been to. One, who I didn't recognise I must say, declared I have just been to the Social Innovation workshop and it was really very interesting. He didn't ask any questions though!
Finally at our Steering Group meeting we were all given Action Points as I recall. I'm afraid other than invite our facilitators for the meeting on 3rd December I have forgotten what the Action Points are. Can someone remind me?
John