AMI@Work history
From AMI@Work Communities Wiki
[edit] Collaboration is our motto
The New Working Environments unit of the European Commission’s Information Society Directorate-General fosters Information Society Technologies (IST) research to catalyse systemic innovation, in order to enable high-quality and productive person-centric and collaborative new working environments in Europe. To achieve this aim it is necessary to link European ‘dream team’ communities of research and deployment in a cross disciplinary manner. The AMI@Work family of self-organising ERA communities links people in all 25 EU Member States and beyond for a European Research and Innovation Area (ERA) at work. This family facilitates new working environments innovation, ERA-wide and in EU 6th and 7th Framework Programmes of research. This family consists of self-organising communities, facilitated by elected leaders, in collaboration with EU projects MOSAIC and SEEMseed, and the New Working Environments unit of the Information Society Directorate-General of the European Commission, together with related Commission services. These communities represent potential cross-fertilising technology themes and challenging validation environments with a significant technological, economic and societal impact. The AMI@Work family of ERA communities itself is a real-life collaboration experiment. ’Practice what we preach’. These communities are based on website membership registration for free by interested individuals.
[edit] History
AMI@Work 'pre-historic' meeting A very first ‘testing the concept’ meeting has been held in Brussels on July 2003, which gathered roughly 100 participants to discuss this initiative and the different communities (see the current AMI@Work family of ERA communities ‘matrix’ figure to identify all existing communities). During this initial ‘pre-historic’ meeting the biggest contributor was the dinosaur (see the above photo).
First Launch preparatory workshop The first launch preparatory workshop has been held in Brussels on March 2004. It brought together approximately 200 people who participated in the plenary session in the morning and in the different community sessions in the afternoon (see the participation figure below).
Second Launch preparatory workshop A second launch preparatory workshop has been held in Budapest on the 14 May 2004 conjointly with a MOSAIC workshop on 15 May 2004.
Main Launch event The main launch event has been held in Brussels, from 7 to 9 June 2004, gathering together about 330 participants. The first day was dedicated to AMI@Work communities, including leadership elections. On the second day, the plenary session has launched the AMI@Work family of ERA communities, and presented EU Information Society Technologies projects related to the Strategic Objective ‘Applications and Services for the Mobile User and Worker’. The third day focused on information, networking and partnering for the future EU IST Calls for Proposals as well as AMI@Work Special Interest Groups.
Erkki Liikanen, European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society observed at the launch plenary that "Innovation is not just a matter of buying technology, it is about redesigning businesses processes and the way things are done. Mobile communications, particularly the next generation of mobile services which allow high speed access to the Internet, e-mail or databases while on the move, will deliver a major boost to productivity and help to strengthen our competitiveness. AMI@Work is a highly innovative way to look at how we can make work more interesting, creative and productive".
During this event, community members have elected their chair and co-chair(s). Afterwhile, all communities' chairs and co-chairs,constituting the leadership group, have elected the family chair and two co-chairs.
AMI@Work Spring event Along 2005, the AMI@Work Spring event has been organised in Budapest in May 2005 to increase participation from New Member States and Acceding Candidate Countries.
AMI@Work Communities Forum day The second event organised in 2005 was the AMI@Work Communities Forum day that has been held in Munich in June 2005. This event was intended to give a chance to communities members to present their work to their colleagues. Twenty papers have been presented and included into the Forum proceedings.
