Since last sunday I was a participant of the first meeting of an european project. It was the first time that I was involved in such a process, so I was very curious what will be happen there.

The meeting took place in Tolmezzo, Italy.

The EU is providing different frameworks. In these frameworks, they try to face the aims, the goals (the dreams ) of the EU coming together.
This project is in the framework Socrates and the people who applied for want to produce a thing called "Teaching Bank" and "Toolkit".

My role was to propose an idea for a website which covers the idea of project. So, I thought, it is a good way to show them Drupal and a small part of wath is possible with CCK and Views. Drupal is Open Source Software, it is comparable with LEGO bricks and  of course ... I like it. Christine is running a project which uses Drupal (cross-cooking.eu). It was a bit tricky to set it up, but the participants like it because of the consistent user interface an the easy way to create content.

In this project the partners are from Latvia, Turkey, Sweden, Italy, UK and Germany.

In the application they have defined different workpackages to reach the aims of the project.

In the meeting room, there was no wireless internet connection, but luckily I had my small fonera router with me. So I tried to find an access to their companies network and after an hour it was working well.

When I attend computer conferences, usually all the people have laptops and they do something with there machines.

Here in this meeting room, there were a few laptops, but it was the Microsoft dominated world. People use MSN, MS Word, MS Powerpoint. Often they receive preconfigured Laptops from their university or company with all that stuff on it. Nobody was using Firefox Browser, Open Office and so on. From one laptop I hear often a sound: "Attention, possible Virus attack!". The owner of that seems to be proud to have a machine like this.

So I realized ... it will be a long way to an open environment like Drupal.

The first day people discuss about bureaucratic things. Budget, subcontracts, work packages ... paper, paper, paper.

For me it was interesting to see how these projects are structured. There was one new partner in the group and the other partners knew each other from former projects. The new partner seems to be very experienced in european things, especially the bureaucratic ones.

It's hard to describe the effects in the meeting but imagine: people from six different countries and cultures try to work together. It reminds me of my own school time, when we try to work in groups. Sometimes it was a disaster, sometimes it was possible and very seldom it was "a cool gang of partners". It takes always time to come together, to understand and respect each other and so on.

The italian partners were very polite, nice, friendly, ... (good people) and they try to offer us a friendly environment (atmosphere) with delicious food and these things.

At the second day we showed our ideas of the website. A website is always a complicated thing because in the beginning you have nearly nothing but an idea and it is hard for people who are usually not involved in these processes to get the idea. Because it was not really clear, how the structure and the outcomes will be at the end, we proposed a few possibilities to come to a solution (different Drupal modules, wiki, ...).

Another small thing I realized: When people see me working with a laptop with internet connection, they assume that I can help them to fix problems on their pc, so I helped a few people to get internet access (in the meeting room, in the hotel ).

For these projects it could be so helpful if all the partner could have a bit more media (internet) experience.

Often they are "prisoners" in closed university/company environments. They have to use services which are sometimes not the best for their work and not their choice. Open Source Software is nearly unknown. Web 2.0 platforms like facebook, flickr, linkedin, ning are not common and when they chat, they know often only MSN. When they like things, they have it on their mobile phone, but the use of the mobiles is expensive (roaming) and it it hard to grab the media from there to the internet.

The whole days I was thinking, what I can do to change something. In the group is one partner with "his own" social network solution which he developed in the last years. It is a platform with "everything abot e-Learning" inside. On one hand it is a good idea, on the other hand it is the "boil the ocean" approach. He was used to this type of software/platform but for me and most of the others in the group it seems to be as closed and complicated as all the other things. May be ten years ago, he had the same experience than me and then was thinking how to do it better ... I don't know.

The target group of the outcome of this project is for me not clear defined at the moment but it seems to be the teachers in the EU and in Turkey. "The teachers" is an interesting term. For example in Germany, we have around 800.000 teachers. The average age is 49!. Any questions about the use of platforms like facebook, myspace, second life ??

Okay ... I will write regularly about my experiences in this project, but now it is enough for today. As I said I enjoyed the time and I am lucky and surely proud to be a part of this project

here are a few photos of the meeting: