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.

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.

The European Network of Living Labs was launched on the 20th of November 2006. The launch took place at the Dipoli Congress Centre in Espoo Finland in connection with a conference entitled "The European Network of Living Labs: A Step Towards a European Innovation System".
The European Network of Living Labs is an important step towards a new European innovation infrastructure. The Network includes, in its first phase, 20 Living Labs from 15 European countries. It also involves more than 100 active researchers and a representative group of innovative European companies. The Living Labs network concentrates on the development of new information society services, businesses, technologies and markets and places people at the very centre of product development and innovation.