Report on 'Big Tent' Global Dialogue Event & follow-up question

PLEASE ALSO SEE: Enhancing North-South Cooperation in Community-University Engagement - Communiqué of September 23, 2010 [2]

Dear Colleagues,

Referenced below* is a brief report on our Big Tent global audio-video conversation.  Please post this on your web-sites and distribute as appropriate. Thanks to Nirmala Lall  from GACER and Alison Peacock from the Institute of Education for their work on this. Thanks to all of you again for making this first experiment so productive.

All of our networks expressed an interest in continuing to collaborate in support of strengthening North-South collaboration in CU research and engagement.  Some of the follow-up that I am aware of includes:  participation at the GUNI Barcelona world conference in November, participation in the PASCAL African regional conference in Botswana in December, participation in the GACER-REPAS-Brighton African Community Engagement conference in Dakar in March, translation of the communiqué into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Danish, and of course wide spread distribution of the communiqué through your various networks.  I know that several conversations are underway as well about potential involvement in projects amongst PRIA and CEBEM and other chats between Living Knowledge Network and PASCAL. Most of us have disseminated the Talloires McJanet Prize information as well.

Question:

Many of you have suggested that we should hold another several global dialogues on more focussed issues in community-higher education research and engagement that could also be pod-casted and made available through our various networks.  It has been suggested that we experiment with one of the other computer based video conferencing systems such as Adobe-Connect Pro which might allow for more of us to be visible to each other.  Mike Osborne at PASCAL has volunteered their subscription to this for us to try out.

Based on our communique and earlier conversations, what topics would be of most interest to yourselves and your networks?  We are thinking of planning a series of three for the 2011 year.

We welcome further ideas and inspiration.  

Warm best wishes,

Budd

GACER Secretariat

*A version in Swedish is also available [3]