Fresh vision: New Councillors and a new Board convene for first 2019 Members Council meeting

In early March, the Europeana Foundation had the great pleasure of welcoming the representatives of the newly elected Europeana Network Association (ENA) Members Council for their first meeting. With a great vibe and team spirit, we spent two days discussing the vision and strategy for the ENA and its role in shaping the Europeana ecosystem, thinking through work plans for ENA communities, and addressing some important Association business.

The first 2019 meeting of the Members Council took place on 5-6 March 2019 in The Hague, Netherlands. For 16 of the 30 present Councillors, it was their very first meeting of this kind. One of them, Ina Bluemel, found the meeting inspiring and thought-provoking, with a ‘colourful mix of liberal-minded, nice people with different skills and backgrounds’.

Identifying priorities

The Council discussed strategic direction and the activities it foresaw up to the end of 2020. With their diverse professional backgrounds, Councillors identified and addressed some of the key upcoming priorities and the opportunities and challenges they bring: strengthening the relation between the ENA and the Europeana Foundation; utilising resources from Europeana Collections in cross-domain curation at European level; or looking for new ways of reaching out to ENA’s audiences within the six communities and beyond. The Council also discussed the ENA’s input into the Europeana Initiative Strategy 2021-2025 and reflected on the implications of last year’s public consultation and the resulting Evaluation of Europeana.

Activating the communities

In 2018, the ENA laid foundations for the establishment of a new community structure and launched six communities. Now, the major focus of the Council is to activate these communities and make them productive by offering the community members clear membership benefits. These benefits include getting to know like-minded professionals worldwide and getting involved in projects and Task Forces on specific topics of common interest. International collaboration, exchanging highly relevant information and advice, and a community vibe is what the Council is aiming for.

The Councillors worked on practical community development by finalising work plans for 2019 for the six communities. Each of these work plans entails lots of concrete interesting activities that you will be invited to join - keep an eye on the community pages as the work plans and activities will be published in due course.

Thank you

The Europeana Foundation would like to say a big thank you to Marco de Niet and the rest of the Management Board for excellent chairing of the meeting, and to praise all the attending Councillors for their highly valuable input and enthusiasm.

As Marco and Georgia concluded, ‘We welcomed no less than 19 new Councillors. Even though the agenda contained some introductory topics, we managed as a group to make good progress in setting up the work plans and governance of the six communities. We very much enjoyed the ideas and conversations about strengthening the ENA as a group of digital culture professionals from across Europe and look forward to seeing the results coming out of the communities.’

Coming up next

All the presentations from the meeting can be found on Europeana Slideshare, and you can find some nice pictures on Europeana’s Flickr. The meeting minutes will be published shortly.

The next Members Council meeting will take place in conjunction with the 2019 AGM and Europeana event in late autumn. We will keep you posted on the exact date and location, so stay tuned!