The Fourth Partner Meeting - London
The main issue at this meeting was the partner countries' presentations of the pilot runs that had, or hopefully had, taken place during the last few months.

This was a very enlightening experience with regards to the common understanding of the projects aims and needs, as a research project.

Due to various problems and misunderstandings not all trial runs had been carried out as prescribed.

Sweden had for a long time been locked in an industrial conflict, leaving them little time to spend finding suitable companies for the trial run. They had now engaged Per Svensson, from SEF (the Swedish trade union) as an additional partner to take charge of the practical work involved on the Swedish side of the project.

Denmark's trade union had developed their own mapping tool, and preferred that their companies should use it, which presented a new challenge for our Danish partner in finding a suitable pilot companies.

UK found it diffucult to "sell in" the project without being able to demonstrate the webtool properly.High speed internet connections are not yet standard in all offices in the target group. UK, in common with the other partners, wished for a demo version of the webtool on cd. This possibility was duly noted by the project manager and would be checked out in the near future.

Greece had managed to find two companies to use as pilots, but their needs turned out to be a bit outside of the scope of the project. This meant that the results would not be comparable with the other countries. This would mean that one of the project's aims, to be able to compare qualifications internationally, would not be reached. Adjustments would have to be made or new companies found.

One of Norway's companies had completed the process all the way through to evaluation. The other had still to evaluate, but had otherwise completed the process.

The evaluation we did of the trial run processes showed, uring the first day of the partner meeting, that we were clearly behind schedule and maybe were still a bit unclear as how best to tackle the immense task of runnin pilots. It became obvious that we would have to postpone the next partner meeting in June, and set up a new date in August. This would give those partners who needed it time to find companies, and others time to redo some of the tasks in accordance with set conditions as similar as possible to each other so that the end results may be comparable. This of course now meant using up our time buffer, so that everything would have to go as planned from now until the next meeting.

At this stage in the project, we have a complete process to offer companies wishing to partake in the project as pilots, including a web based competence mapping tool that has had most of the flaws ironed out in 5 European languages. After the pilot runs, we should also have enough information to say if the tool and process as a whole, are suitable for use in the five partner countries, and what adjustments would be needed to to make it internationally viable.

Although many hours were spent on demanding discussions and teamwork during this partner meeting, we did as usual, take time out for social activities on Thursday afternoon. As always the host partner had planned well. We had an interesting guided tour of a few chosen pieces of art at the Tate Modern Art Gallery down by the Thames, followed by a view of London from the millenium wheel "The London Eye". We then followed the walkway along the riverembankment to one of London's oldest watering holes for a pub meal, before returning to a theatre close by the hotel to see a Bollywood musical.

Activities like this give us time to allow the discussions of the first two days to ripen, and often lead to good solutions to difficult problems on the third and last working day of the partner meeting. This Thursday was no exception. And Friday's discussions, as has been the case at every partner meeting, ended on a very productive note.

We're all in the same boat, so to speak. As long as we all keep rowing in the same direction, we'll be able to see the results of our hard work at the next and final partner meeing in Sweden at the end of August, and have them ready to present at the International Conference planned for Olso in the late Autumn.