Impact

Goals:
- To provide an effective training and contacts tool for local Authorities in France, Europe and the world
- To offer an opportunity to acquire new or deeper knowledge, build up competencies or even change careers or advance in one's career
- To federate know-how and experiences
- To serve as the support for a vast information-sharing and learning network on public policies in local e-Governance.

Obtained results in its first pilot edition (2004/2005):
- 98 enrolled students from 14 different countries
- On average, 17% accessed the courses daily
and 57% did it at least once every three days.
- The program provided access to a large
set of texts, made available by several authors in several languages. Altogether 214 texts were provided, including obligatory readings and references such as
articles, books, chapters of books, websites and others.
- 33 videos with teachers' presentation
- Throughout the 7 modules, 35 topics of discussion were proposed, totalizing 1018 contributions, which resulted in a rich discussion in terms of ideas and comparing experiences.
- 35 chat rooms were set up, totalizing 42 hours of discussion, with the presence of 180 participants.
- Another tool to assess students’ performance was the final work, an essay of about 10 pages handed in at the end of each module, which should link the contents and concepts dealt with in the courses to the students’ individual experiences.When analyzing the subjects and contents of the essays, one can notice that the objective of linking content to experience was achieved. This is proved by the diversity of concrete cases reported in the essays and their analysis based on the concepts worked out by the teachers.

Track record of sharing

A book has been published with the results of the pilot experience (see "additional documents"). Based on the success of the pilot, the project was relaunched in a new version by the city of Vandouevre, and funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - The contact established between citizens,
municipality officials – persons in charge of the creation, implementation and evaluation of public policies – and university teachers/researchers demonstrated, allowed the creation of a network of practitioners and academics sharing different experiences.

Lesson 2 - Participants could have a broader vision of, among other elements, the variety and complexity of the dilemmas, but also pointed to concrete alternatives for improving democracy.

Lesson 3 - In a multicultural environment, the training was able to promote and implement a dialectical relation university / society / government and, more importantly, to incite discussions, analyses and changes in the public policies with effective potential to transform the picture of governance at the local level.