nowEurope

Early this year I was invited to become a team member contributing to the Regional Innovation Strategy of Southern Moravia within the working group responsible for communication and international relations. One of the topics discussed was how to coordinate activities realized by a large number of institutions.

Universities, local SMEs, multinational enterprises, regional agencies, City Council, chambers of commerce and many others plan their seminars, conferences, workshops etc. and sometimes compete for the limited attention of the same target groups.

It’s a similar situation for clubs and cultural institutions organising concerts, exhibitions etc. Just this weekend we have in Brno several attractive events featuring foreign bands competing with each other, while some weeks later there may be silent podiums in front of hungry spectators.

My question is obvious. How does it work in your cities? Is there a net-based service where organisers share their planned events weeks or months? In my understanding the main difficulty lies in coordinating and motivating all the sides to share and regularly update the content while technical side is quite easy and may be solved by free services like Google Calendar.

What is your experience? As a user or an organiser? What are the best practices and what typical mistakes? If there is a concrete example on the web - from whatever country in Europe or elsewhere - please let us know in the comments.

One of the CITT goals is to help network regional initiatives and cluster the potential partners together. It would make sense not to duplicate existing events or plan them for a wrong time. The basic question at the beginning is do we have any ICT / innovation calendars that could be shared across our countries?