Perhaps it is because our offices are around the corner from one to another, but 2008 saw strengthened collaboration between ECDPM and Euforic.In 2008, the website europafrica.org, originally designed to support the public consultation process on the EU-Africa Partnership Agreement, became a platform for news and resources on the Joint Africa-EU Strategy. Euforic supported the website from a technical perspective, and has provided ECDPM with advice and assistance in its redesign, adding new features and functionalities. We also promoted the content of the site, indexing relevant content and contributing to the dissemination of the europafrica newsfeed, read by hundreds of subscribers.
We also supported the development and launch of the project site "Whither EC Aid?" (WECA), jointly run by ECDPM and ActionAid. The main objective of this project was to re-position the debate on monitoring the effectiveness of EC development cooperation. We helped set up the website, trained ECDPM staff in managing and maintaining it, and we helped promote and disseminate the content via newsfeeds and email alerts.
In both projects, we helped bridge language barriers by translating the main parts of the websites from English to Fench, and translating and contexualising interesting news items as they were published.
In April, ECDPM hosted the 3rd Euforic workshop: 'Introducing Blogs, Wikis, Newsfeeds and RSS'. It familiarized participants with new tools and showed how to use them to deliver a low cost, participatory, and more integrated web presence. The Fourth in the series will be held in April 2009
We further strengthened our collaboration through ongoing exchanges between the ECDPM KM Team and Euforic team: examining statistics and metrics, feeds and feeds management, the use of videos and audio files, thematic blogs and wikis.
This collaboration is expected to carry on in 2009.
See the Euforic newsfeeds on ECDPM and on EU-ACP cooperation.