At the European Telework Development Initiative website
ACTS Telework Chain (GAT: General Access - Telework)

Minutes of the ACTS TELEWORK CHAIN (GAT) 4TH MEETING

TIME AND PLACE

4th November 1996, 09.00 to 13.00
Town Hall Vienna, Austria

PARTICIPANTS

MEETING HIGHLIGHTS

The 4th meeting was referred to the role of the GAT Chain as stated in the published ACTS booklets and as considered in previous meetings. The GAT Chain role was summarised as - assisting to focus the products of ACTS projects and the attention of users and the market place on the point of confidence; that is, on the particular conditions which stimulate customers to acquire and to apply those products.

The acting Chairman, Paul Devoldere handed over to the new Chairman, Noel Hodson
who led the meeting, with as the main point on the agenda :

*** Telework Guidelines ***

The ETD project has established a website for the GAT Chain and an email list
for those wishing to receive information about the Chain's activities.

The following working documents prepared by ETD were distributed to the group :


The Workplan proposes three Telework Guidelines as follows :
ETD explained the reasons for proposing these Guidelines :

DG XIII B presented extracts from the document ACTS : Marketing the Guidelines -
Action Plan (http://www.eto.org.uk/gat/files/sellgdl1.doc) which is a draft, which can be expected to be modified after discussion at the GA concertation meeting and in a Concertation Management meeting in Brussels held on 4 November 1996 concurrently with the GAT meeting. (Note that the
version at the website had already been superseded by the version presented at the 4th November meeting, a current version will be posted to the website as soon as its available).

The group discussion resulted in the required decisions and action points on
guidelines (see below) ; as it progressed the following points were raised or
clarified:
  1. Out of the 157 ACTS projects, some 75 could be GAT candidates
  2. A Chain is operated by projects for projects, to contribute to the overall process
  3. Guidelines are proposed by any project, horizontal or vertical
  4. Guidelines development is a simple process - agree them firstly in this group, identify a larger group of interested audiences and obtain their agreement
  5. The target audience for this group is not the EC, it is the larger audience - the EC is part of the validation process - for instance, the interoperability issue should be also discussed outside the ACTS community, i.e. with suppliers, etc. The Commission is however part of the target audience for policy guidelines and is solely responsible for presenting such guidelines to the Parliament and the Council, at its discretion, once a guideline has been endorsed. DG XIII C1 offers to help to engage the attention of projects outside GAT, e.g. in TAP
  6. GAT external communication should include e-mail (and even paper), in addition to the WWW, since for some guidelines key audiences are not yet accessible via email or the www.

DECISIONS AND ACTION POINTS

The workplan was adopted, subject to revision in the light of outcomes from the Concertation Management meeting and the updated Marketing document.

Responsibilities for Guidelines was assigned as follows:

G1 : group agreed this should be led by ETD, group to input comments on available draft by end November 1996, then ETD will seek participation of other projects

G2 : draft by ETD available, DIPLOMAT undertook that Katarina Almquist and Kirsti Kallio will seek involvement of Prof. Deirdre Hunt and liaise with ETD, again with a view to getting as much input as possible by end of November 1996

G3 : group agreed it will be led by DIPLOMAT, first draft will be ready by end November 1996.

Additional guidelines may be suggested by any project at any time, so long as the project making the proposal is prepared to invest effort in producing at least a preliminary draft as a basis for comments and further work.

Identification of the target recipients for telework guidelines: will be started after the next iteration of the two existing drafts; ETD and DIPLOMAT will liaise to ensure good linkage between target recipients for Guidelines and target audiences and signatories for the Telework Charter MoUs.

Next (5th) GAT concertation meeting date: It was agreed that this will be decided after the outcomes of the Concertation Management meeting are known so as to fit in with other concertation activities and avoid another clash of dates if possible.

The ACTS concertation dates have since been published and we have provisionally
scheduled GAT meetings to coincide with these:

Additional meetings may of course be held for interest groups in connection with particular Guidelines.

All GAT participants are now asked to review the two draft guidelines G1 and G2
and use the facilities at the website to post comments as quickly as possible.

Comments from the Commission have also been requested in respect of G2, so as to confirm or otherwise that this is getting close to the kind of Guideline envisaged by the ACTS workplan.

Those Present Were:

Katarina Almquist - DIPLOMAT
Alessandro Barbagli (EC DG XIII B)
Eduardo Barrera - TECODIS, BOURBON
Sandford Bessler - DIANE
Maarten Botterman (EC DG XIII B)
Enrique de la Serna - DIPLOMAT
Paul Devoldere - TOBASCO, IBCoBN
Annakaysa Hayrynen - BOURBON
Josef Hochgerner (part) - DIPLOMAT
Noel Hodson - DIPLOMAT
Alan Husselbee - ETD
Michel Ickx (part) - ETD
Kirsti Kallio - DIPLOMAT
Horace Mitchell - ETD
Manuel Monteiro (part) (EC DG XIII C5)
Carlos Oliveira (part) (EC DG XIII C1)
Andrew Page - DIPLOMAT, MUNICIPIA
Tapio Rissanen (part) (EC DG XIII C1)
Christian Van Asbroeck - ETD
Bo Widen - TECODIS
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Prepared by :
Christian Van Asbroeck
GAT Chain Secretariat

For further information on the subject matter of this document please contact Christian Van Asbroeck

ACTS Telework Chain Index Page

European Telework Development Initiative - Home Page
Page address http://www.eto.org.uk/gat/agendas/min1104.htm
Last updated 21 November 1996