I watched an interesting video recording of a "brown bag lunch" on client communities of practice at the World Bank.

Sorry to be so quiet. I have just returned from a Dialogue in Florence, Italy about Communities of Practice. It was a privilege and interesting to share stories and experiences with people who are working in this area in different parts of the world.

My story in CIARIS began one afternoon nearly two years ago when José Manuel Henriques telephoned me. I was doing my shopping in Jumbo at the time!

My recollection is that José Manuel was an external evaluator for a project with ACIME in Portugal. ACIME had also been partners in project about exclusion in schools where I had been an external evaluator.

José Manuel introduced me to Philippe Vanhuynegem who invited me to prepare the modules "Strategies for combating social exclusion at a local level." In the beginning I said "No way Phillipe! I am trying to finish writing my doctorate." But he was rather persuasive!

I am one of the STEP member and have been fully involved in CIARIS since January 2005, when I took charge of the overall development and monitoring of CIARIS. We are actually a team working either in developing CIARIS or in applying concrete actions in the countries (the PALOP, Brazil and Eastern Europe in particular) and are implemting our actions based on... most of you (!!!) as partners of this initiative. 

A bit of history...Since its inception the philosphy has quite evolved. It was initially (in 2003) conceived as a "standard" methodological package, built by a group of experts (Jordi and Jose Manuel were already in at that time) under the supervision and guidance of STEP (Philippe Marcadent and Michaela Balke in particular).  The idea was to provide practical tools and guidance for local actors to improve their actions in the fight against exclusion. In brief, it was though as a set of documents, that each organization/people could use depending on his/her own needs. For instance, the package provides practical information to implement diagnosis taking into account some key fundamental principles. It also provides examples and projects which had used such methodologies. It is only during the process of building up the package that the idea of using ICT came across. It was initially though to increase the potential of dissemination of KN and to benefit from what the new technologies could offer, i.e online services. This is why the CIARIS platform appears as a website with content section and online services.