The Global Diplomacy Network Working Group Meeting kicked off on Thursday, 26th June, 2014 at the Mayfield Hotel & Resort in Seoul, South Korea.
In attendance were participants from 18 countries, namely, Caitlin Byrne (Australia), Yuen Pau Woo (Canada), Michaela Lee (Czech), Eric Messerschmidt (Denmark), Karlo Funk (Estonia), Pal Hatos (Hungary), Louis Eriomala (Nigeria), Adelina Suemith (Philippines), Pawel Potoroczyn (Poland), Cristina Faustino (Portugal), Jean Tan (Singapore), Maria Jose Romero (Spain), Annika Rembe (Sweden), Chun-I Chen (Taiwan), Saban Cobanoglu (Turkey), Booyeon Lee Allen (USA), and the host, Korea.
The meeting commenced at about 9.30am with opening remarks by Dr. Du Hyeogn Cha, Executive Vice President, The Korea Foundation; and this was followed by three discussion sessions in Day One.
The first was Institutional Membership and Funding, moderated by Dr. Cha, who proposed two sets of membership: Full Membership, comprising all the Working Committee Members and Associate Membership, which will be institutions that may join later; while The Korea Foundation promised to fund the operations of the Network in the next two years (2014 and 2015).
The second discussion session, which was moderated by Booyeon Lee Allen, centred on Programmes and Participants for the Annual Assembly scheduled for launch from 23-25 October, 2014 in Seoul; just the Assembly is to look into ways by which countries can cooperate, monitor and evaluate future programmes.
The last discussion session of the day, moderated by Caitlin Byrne, was on possible areas for Joint Projects and Cooperation among Member Institutions; and the following were identified: Internship Programmes for Junior and Middle Level Managers; Library/Data Base on Public/Cultural Diplomacy; International Conference on Emerging Trends in Public/Cultural Diplomacy; A day set aside to Promote Public/Cultural Diplomacy; Working together in Clusters of two or more institutions in a region; and Website design, among other issues.
Louis Eriomala
From Seoul, Korea