"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right."  ~Oprah Winfrey

There is about one month left to the year 2010. A month that many will spend, happily rejoicing in the splendour of the fairy lights and Christmas markets, of the special holiday crackers and the Santas decorating the facade of random buildings, giving the paths we follow in our daily lives a feeling of wonder, a spirit of magic. Even (or rather, "especially"), the shops will join into the fun, supplying us among others with „special“ outfits to wear „especially“ on New Year’s eve. New dresses and new resolutions have something in common, after all.

Yet wise people know better than to make resolutions or changes without knowing if something could be improved upon in the first place; and while the lovely holiday spirit is quite undeniable, some of us will spend part of the month in introspection, trying to figure out how we could, in fact, improve.

This is as true for individuals as it is for organisations; the end of a year is also a time of frantic activity, when companies close the books, or lay out coming budgets. It is exactly the right time to observe the results of our past works, and expand them or even develop projects and launch them internally.  With the New Year and budget, they can receive the proper attention and resources.

But new projects take time to hatch; they need to brew academically for a while, and then receive the approval of a panel of experts to incarnate into more than talk. Conversely, when a panel of experts gathers to discuss how things have progressed, how they will yet, and work out a strategy for possible future developments, it is usually a positive sign: it suggests that this is an organisation ready to use past mistakes to improve itself, and grow further.

From the perspective of the Eco-C, a „positive sign“ of this kind is to be sent out in Vienna on December 10th, when Prof. Thomas Bauer, Dr. Willie Kroupa, Dr. Silvia Wolf, Dr. Andreas Stoehr, Prof. Torsten Kuehlmann, Prof. Sandor Bordas, Karina Kaiblinger and Leopold Kaiblinger are scheduled to meet and review the year 2010, as well as look into new trends in the field of communications, including further developments that would enable the ECo-C to integrate those trends.

But this „positive sign“ is preceded by another: the participants of this meeting have requested that any who might have useful inputs on these topics communicate them by email to the following address: eco-c@ipkeurope.org . The purpose of this move is of course to examine the potential of further ideas, but one cannot help but see it as an expression of openness, realism and readiness to communicate, in accordance with the principle goals of the ECo-C itself.