Conference Highlights: eChallenges 2003

Mícheál Ó Foghlú (TSSG, WIT) attended the eChallenges 2003 conference in Bologna from 22nd-24th October 2003.


As a member of the International Programme Committee, He chaired three sessions:

• 
  2b eWork: Issues
  (surprising evidence suggests that the
  flexible working patterns are most likely to be found in heavy urban
  areas in the EU at present);


• 4g Broadband and Mobility: Regional Case Studies
  (in all
  countries there is a tension between the free-market approaches and
  government subsidised approaches to broadband provision; even where a
  free market approach is adopted, small-scale local government schemes
  can have a big impact in rural and peripheral regions);
• 6a eBusiness: Interoperability
  (whilst XML
  technologies provide a potential automated processing language for many
  solutions, much work needs to be done in each domain to agree on actual
  schemas even within a broad ebXML-based approach).

Mícheál also presented a paper (authored by Frank Wilson, Margaret Grene, Hill Stewart and Davorin Rogina, available here) on the results of the Flexwork
project. This project was co-ordinated by the TSSG in WIT and has
deployed a portal site disseminating information to nearly 500 regional
catalysts impacting on many more SMEs in various regions across the EU
and the New Applicant States. The materials are all available for free
from the portal website (all are in English, and some have been
translated into other languages according to local requirements).


The proceedings of the conference have been published in two volumes and are distributed in the UK, the USA and in Japan:

Cunningham P., Cunningham M., & Fatelnig P.

Building the Knowledge Economy: Issues, Applications, Case Studies
(2003)

IOS Press, Oxford UK, ISBN 1-58603-379-4.

Our WIT colleague Dr Ted O'Keeffe of the ISOL group also presented a paper at this conference on organisational learning.