I've asked to make a proposal for arranging a "Personal EU" panel discussion as a part of the Bled eCollaboration Conference in Bled, Slovenia, June 15-18th.

I've sent my proposal. Today's challence however is that the panelists must be participants of the conference - and represent more than one country.

Mr. Bror Salmelin (Policy Advisor, European Commission) has accepted my invitation to be the chair of the panel.

Is Living Lab a good name for this activity when we are involving human being?
The activity is clear enough but who wants to be participant in a lab? Understanding for participant the object under study.
Living Lab activity consider citizen as part of the innovation process as a participant and not as a "object under study".
The idea behind this comment is that we all, as coordinators of Living Labs, must be careful when talking about that to citizens.
So, will they understand that they are participants of a Lab instead of an object of study?

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.

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.

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?

The Apple iPod is said to be an innvoative product. I learned a few days ago that the MP3 format and WAW originated at the Frauenhof Institute in Germany.

It would be nice to get more details about this.

Skype was Invented here on the old continent but eBay decided to make it to a part of its money machine.

EU is good on innovation but we need to think more in terms of applications and business innovations.

I wish I could be in the Living Labs workshop today. Just to see from your faces that you all are live persons, unique Living Labs.

In speaking about Living Labs I hope we don't forget, that we ourselves as citizensand professionals are the base unit of EU's success.

Naturally we have to work wonders, but nobody else will do it for us personnally.

That's why all 500 000 000 EU citizens have (the pleasure) to be essential on union level.

Until now you've found it on
www.personaleu.net - but to point out that I really want us all together to make the Personal EU era come true, I brought it home to .eu

Innovative Interactivity!

Kurt