European Awareness Scenario Workshops
The European Awareness Scenario Workshops (EASW) are an initiative of the INNOVATION programme, launched in 1994, with the aim of exploring possible new actions and social experiments for the promotion of an environment favouring innovation in Europe. A new homepage has been launched on the CORDIS World Wide Web server, in order to encourage the widest dissemination of the methods and results of the initiative. The EASW initiative focused on two fields of action: - Assessing the transferability of best practices between different cultural and political contexts, including identification of conditions for success; - Identification and further development of instruments and tools to support the know-how transfer processes. In the first phase, projects concentrated on the urban environment, allowing social actors to focus on the formulation of a common vision for sustainable development in the local/regional context. At this stage, the initiative had a major contribution from the Sustainable Cities Campaign, run by DG XI. A second phase, begun recently, has now widened the initiative to other fields where sustainable development is relevant, including health, transport and mobility, and information technologies. The EASW homepage contains a brief introduction to the initiative, contacts for national monitors in the Member States, and will also have a bulletin board service for discussion of the initiative and its developments. In addition, users may download a wide range of multimedia software related to the initiative, allowing them to organize workshops themselves.