The widely recognised transition to e-Work brought by recent advances in Internet technology, Web intelligence, virtual social networks and the emerging knowledge economy has necessitated a “rethinking” of our collaborative working environments, and created a renewed need for intelligent Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. Emerging models of distributed virtual projects, namely e-Science, e-Business, e-Health, e-Governance and rural e-Services require creative and adaptive environments that will offer appropriate on-demand knowledge to augment workers’capabilities, and semantically facilitate natural interactions among e-Workers (humans, machines and applications) during collaborative problem-solving and decision-making.

Every member of every Living Lab has 4 essential roles in developing the European future:

1) Role as professional expert of something
2) Role as individual: an unique base unit of life and challenges
3) Role as private person with national citizenship and point of view
4) Role as citizen of the future European union.

I'd like to participate every EU-wide event to tell this and to try make every project itself to a good example towards a "Personal EU era". Unfortunately I don't have resources to do that. You who know the Personal EU initiative and like it: Your next presentation or comment in your next EU collaboration event could be essential support for new and better practices.

Exactly a week ago, on Tuesday, April 24th, I took part in a workshop
organized by Ecospace in order to educate CoreLabs people about the AMI@Work Communities tools and discuss further requirements of the system.
We went over the different existing tools:

• The wiki
• The BSCW system
• The blogs

In the wiki, we first discussed the navigation paradigm. As it is today, the navigation bar on the left is a static bar that gives a variety of navigation options in the AMI@Work communities. Having a variety of options is very important, however, too many options may be counter productive. When newcomers to a community (not AMI@Work, but one of the communities in it) receive a direct link to their community (like I originally received a link to the CoreLabs page) they are quite overwhelmed by the amount of options. They want to learn about their own community, but with a single click in the navigation bar they are taken one level up and see bounds of information of all communities. This is very confusing and it seems that a dynamic bar is required. A bar that would put, at its top, the navigation options of the community itself (e.g., to the blog category of the community rather than to the blogs homepage / to the communities BSCW space rather than to the BSCW homepage / and to additional wiki pages of the community that are of interest to the community). Only under these community navigation options, should the user find more general navigation options.

Citizen-centricity is popular in today's European eloquence. The commission speaks about it. The parliament speaks about it. Seminar and conference themes and summarys speak about it. Proposals and projects speak about it. Headlines of regional, national and union-wide information society programmes speak about it.

But what has every time until now happened to it when it's time to make the speaches come true? The paragraphs and hierarchic organizations somehow just roll over the human-faced ideas: speaking as humans in decision making suddenly isn't fashion any more.

Please read my new column "New working environments".
There are other interesting texts too in the blog
"EUNGLISH - Bad English for good business people".

Successful cooperation!

Kurt
kurt.linderoos@personaleu.eu
www.personaleu.eu

Since 2005 I've participated in the AMI collaboration. For a small SME with a big idea it's not easy, because of much smaller resources than the big ones have. Now after 2 years I know this is not just my problem: The most of us have missed the continuing contact to the essentials. And still we all easily could be present and available in everything that is important to us. I'm speaking about
1) different ways to participate in events

In the process of trying to figure out the existing functionalities of the collaboration platform, and collecting ideas for required functionalities, a few questions come to my mind:

1. Who are the expected users of the collaboration platform?
   
   1. Only LL leaders / operators?
   2. Or everybody?
2. Should there be different networks for personal vs. professional use? (I expect there should)
   

Hello,

My name is Michal Jacovi and I belong to the Collaboration Technologies department in IBM Haifa Research Lab. My academic background is in Computer Science (MSc, 1993), but my personal interest and my professional expertise focus on the human aspects of interaction with technology, and specifically on collaboration through technology. A list of my publications may be found here, and as you can see there, I deal with community-building and diffusion of technologies. In my current role I'm involved in quite a few of the projects of my group, which deal with: presence, social networks, and capturing of experiences.

We are talking with Kurt Linderoos about the means to connect those persons who can't participate in the many meetings going on in relationship to LivingLabs@Work and other communities.

A chat funtion might be a good idea or an integration of skype to this platform to enhance group meetings.

* To improve the interactivity
* Real time commenting
* How about podcasts to get a voice to the community?

To rise the AMI Communities brand among all EU innovation society developers, investors and decision makers, and to wake up the EU citizens to understand their enormous personal possibilities on union level, I make this initiative:

AMI Communities, in cooperation with the EU Commission, challenge every 27 EU capital to create within one year a Personal EU Meetpoint. A Personal EU Meetpoint is a very centric situated public square - equipped with 27 signed street stones in a circle. Each stone has the abbreviation of an EU member state name (AU, BE, CZ, CY, DE, DK...). The letters are sand blowed so that the total solution is very elegant and doesn't disturb walking on the square. The base costs of one Personal EU Meetpoint (27 signed street stones could be as little as 1-2000 €). The effect of a Personal EU Meetpoint however can be something very essential, because it helps people from different EU countries easily to network with eachothers - ex tempore and using organized performances.