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.

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

I have a feeling that we need to get down to some very practical , down to earth work, or we will continue to search for the best collaboration models for years.

- Collaboration
- Engineering
- Knowledge
- Leadership
- LivingLabs
- Logistics
- Media
- Mobility
- Rural
- SEEM
- Well-being-Services

What could be the first practical thing?

Looking at what said Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0: "nobody even knows what it means". There is an interesting article relating this story at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060901-7650.html
which has been written by Nate Anderson.

Let me quote what TBL said "When asked if it's fair to say that the difference between the two might be fairly described as "Web 1.0 is about connecting computers, while Web 2.0 is about connecting people," Berners-Lee replied, "Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0,' it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0."

The term "middleware" has been widely used for many years while people are still using it with different meanings. Looking at Wikipedia, it is said:

"Middleware is computer software that connects software components or applications. It is used most often to support complex, distributed applications. It includes web servers, application servers, content management systems, and similar tools that support application development and delivery. Middleware is especially integral to modern information based on XML, SOAP, Web services, and service-oriented architecture."

I've been discussing With Roberto Santoro after the "Regional Innovation Clusters" workshop that has been held in Rome on 21 April 2006 about his vision of using a metaphoric representation of Collaborative Innovation which is "the Garden of Ideas".

I've recently initiated a new working group fully dedicated to the new research field of Knowledge Connection. This working group is currently constituted of different expertises working together on developing related concepts such as:
- People-concepts networking
- Perceptual arena
- People-concept graphic maps

Two papers have already been prepared, one about introducing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to better support People-concept graphic maps in 3D and another one about the integration of shared workspaces, community wiki and community blogging to provide more efficient people-concepts networking environments.