Last year, at the Forum Cultural Mundial in Rio, you all participated one way or another in the first International Meeting of Cultural Networks. We have finally completed the report of our meeting in Rio (thanks to Soledad Dominguez!) and Soledad is now working on a Spanish translation which should be available in about a month.

During that meeting, we prepared our thoughts and nominated some of the people in the group to speak on behalf of the cultural networks at a separate session with a number of foundations who were also having an international meeting. The aim was to start to bring the perspectives of the foundations and of the cultural networks a bit closer. The foundations found the meeting very useful, and asked Fondazione Fitzcarraldo and IETM to organise a second 'International Workshop for Foundations and Cultural Networks". We are very pleased to announce that this will take place in Turin, Italy from 16 - 18 November 2007. The budget is tiny but we have managed to make a short programme with representatives of 10 foundations and 10 cultural networks. Just as in Rio, the networks have been selected in order to try and have a balance according to geography, type and size of the network, gender of participants, function of the network. (Not so easy with only 10 networks!!!)

We will be making a final report much more quickly this time, and we wish to keep you all informed of progress, next steps and we certainly intend to enlarge the mailing list to ensure the initiative is open to all cultural networks.

Although there is not a single person responsible for taking the initiative forward, we did make a steering group and it would be good to see if you (or others) are still interested to work further.
Certainly on the institutional side, both Ana Zuvela Busnja (Culture Link) and Sarah Gardner (IFACCA) have volunteered to help host documentation for us. Shall we see what happens in Turin and start thinking together again?