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University of Helsinki

Adum Workshop

The workshop itself
Important information
Annex
The project
The team
The website
How to use the website

The workshop is designed as a space for conference delegates who are willing to work together, or with an ad hoc team, to develop one or more particular proposals of potential benefit to "lesser-used" language communities.

This "potential benefit" may or may not be directly related to the language of such communities. They may involve activities or products that are conducted in, or developed, in such languages (e.g. Information Society Technology - IST; Comenius…). They may be aimed at strengthening the socioeconomic cohesion of a community under threat of depopulation (in which case the ERDF - Leader, for example - may be more relevant funding system, yet the word language may only appear in the context of defining the target group, not the actual activities themselves). They may be aimed at several or even many different groups, to promote professional or cultural exchanges (Leonardo da Vinci, Culture 2000…); and so on.

Adum's slogan is: "Working together to promote regional and minority languages in Europe".

Adum (which means 'together' in Friulian) is co-funded through a call for proposals in the framework of the Action Plan 2004-06 "Promoting language learning and linguistic diversity" The project aims to disseminate information on EU funding possibilities for regional and minority languages.

Adum has created databases for researchers, potential partners and sources of information; information for minority language groups on Commission co-financing programmes, and how to access these mainstream sources of funding; and an interactive networking environment allowing participants to work together.

The website, which is shortly to be uploaded on to the internet, also includes:

  • A manual on how to design a European project proposal,
  • Information on EU programmes and actions, including a needs analysis document,
  • a set of interesting case studies, and
  • a forum where organisations working for over 60 linguistic communities can share information and work together to design proposals.

The Adum project has received funding until close to the end of 2005, but the whole structure will be left in place and the team hopes that it will thus continue to be of assistance well into the future.

The workshop itself

  1. The workshop will last about 1,5-2,5 hours.
  2. The session will start with a fairly detailed explanation of the project: the methodology employed and the resources that have been put at the disposal of the "lesser-used" language communities of the European Union.
  3. Next, participants will be invited to start discussing the ideas (prior to actual project proposals) that they would like to develop. The Adum team will respond with advice, and help each group to start working on a simulation, using real EU programme forms as well as the relevant documents from the Adum website.
  4. The aim is for all to be able to share the problem-solving approach that the project has adopted.
  5. It will be of greatly enhanced benefit if those who are interested contact the convenors well before the conference. In our view the best system would be for the Adum team to obtain regular lists of enrolments, with email addresses, so as to be able to contact delegates directly. In this way, an early start can be made to the task of defining an idea and pinpointing potential partners who would, of course, be contacted by the Adum team and encouraged to enrol on the conference.
  6. Especially welcome will be delegates who have in the recent past developed successful proposals, which may or may not relate to lesser-used language communities, but which in any event they consider to have entailed solving problems similar to those people and institutions from such communities are likely to face.

Important information

If you are interested in the ADUM workshop you shall contact the Adum team well beforehand, either to:

Miquel Strubell MA MSc
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Professor del Programa d'Humanitats
E-Mail: mstrubell@uoc.edu

or to:

Aina Villalonga i Vadell
E-Mail: avillalongav@uoc.edu

After this you need to register normally at the Conference registration form at:
http://www.palmenia.helsinki.fi/congress/bilingual2005/register.asp

Annex

PRESENTATION OF THE PROJECT, THE TEAM AND THE WEBSITE

Adum Website

The project

ADUM is a project offering information on EU programmes relevant for the funding of minority language promotion projects. It includes an interactive networking environment, to aid the drafting of proposals.

The ADUM project aims to offer people and organisations throughout Europe that work for the so-called "regional" or "minority" languages information on the European programmes that can be taken advantage of to (co)fund projects to promote these languages. Likewise, ADUM offers a virtual space to aid the drafting of European proposals by bodies and people working for over 60 linguistic communities in Europe . The project has received co-funding thanks to a call for proposals published by the European Commission, in the context of the Communication from the Commission, Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004-2006 (COM 2003 449 final of 24 July 2003).

The team

The partners in this project are the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Barcelona, Catalonia), the Research Centre on Multilingualism (Katholieke Universiteit Brussel, Brussels); the Centre for European Research, Wales; the Institute of Ethnic Studies (Institut za Narodnostna Vprasanja, Ljubljana, Slovenia); the International Centre for the Study of Plurilingualism (Centro Internazionale sul Plurilinguismo, Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy) and the independent consultant Dónall Ó'Riagáin from Ireland. Members of the team have worked together on other European projects, such as Euromosaic and Atlantis. The Adum initiative is part of the macro-project on cultural diversity in Europe led by the Europa Diversa Network.

The website

The ADUM website, as soon as it is uploaded onto the Internet, will be available in English, French and German, and will provide access to a database of potential European partners and consultants, and a useful list of research documents and sites available on the Internet.

Visitors to the site are invited to join the list of potential partners and consultants, and will also find detailed advice in the form of:

How to use the website

Follow these steps if you have an idea and want to develop it into a fully-fledged project proposal to present to the Commission with as high a chance of obtaining co-funding as possible. You are free to change the order of the steps if you need to search for special information to develop a project.

1. A short introductory text in the "Develop your proposal" section explains the steps to be followed.

2. You can then read a short chart-style presentation of the results of our "Community needs" analysis, which should enable you to identify the language communities whose priority needs are, in our opinion, consistent with your idea.

3. If you like, you can access and read at your leisure a much longer text which explains the theoretical grounding for our work, the steps we took, and the information we used, in order to develop the chart.

4. You will also have received from our document an idea of which EU programs, by subject area, might be suitable for funding your project. You can read through our "EU programmes" section which gives the basic information on each programme / action.

5. You should now have the basic information and are in a position to start developing your idea into a project proposal. You need appropriate tools to undertake this task. These basic learning resources will be the "Guidelines" and the "Case studies" (examples of real proposals) and the "Research database".

6. The "Guidelines" are contained in a fairly detailed document explaining the whole process (both technical and administrative), from a problem-solving perspective; and giving advice on both how to design a project and how to write the proposal. The logical framework approach - in a simplified format - has been chosen here for its clarity.

7. Now you will need some real examples. These are the "Case studies",each of which highlights some of the problems encountered in drafting real, project proposals actually co-funded under various EU programmes, and how they were dealt with.

8. To develop your proposal you may need background information, including addresses of regional EU offices. Some of this you can obtain through the "Research database".

9. Then, in order to look for suitable partners for your project, you can use the database of "Partners and experts" (which you invited to join, of course), and also make a specific call through our "forum".

10. Once you have set up an initial team to draft the proposal and distribute the work packages and tasks in the proposal, you can either use the "Forum" or set up your own distribution list (e.g. through www.yahoogroups.com), so as to engage in collaborative knowledge construction, with the proposal as the end-product. You should find the "Guidelines" document, and the logical framework approach, very handy during this stage.

11. You are now ready to start.

Provisional list of selected EU programmes for the Adum website

  1. Culture 2000-2006
  2. e-Content
  3. e-Learning
  4. Equal
  5. European Regional Development Fund (Interrreg III, Leader +)
  6. European Social Fund
  7. INTI
  8. Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity (Action Plan)
  9. Leonardo da Vinci II
  10. Media Plus
  11. Phare
  12. Research and Technological Development (FP6: Craft, IST…)
  13. Socrates II
  14. Tacis
  15. Tempus III
  16. Town Twinning
  17. Youth 2000-2006

 

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