INVITATION EN.CPS ANNUAL MEETING which is going to take place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania from April 24th to April 26th, 2005. Dear participants in EN.CPS, the E in our network’s title is about to become more truly European. I am happy to send you this invitation for our next Annual Meeting which is going to take place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania from April 24th to April 26th, 2005. Kai-Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen and his wife Denisa who were with us last year in Dunblane (Scotland) have invited us to Romania and we agreed together to accept their offer. Thus, our Annual Meeting will be hosted in their “Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania” (PATRIR). As in previous years the EN.CPS annual meeting will take place in the same place and timely linked to the annual meeting of the Europe branch of Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). Here are the overall dates: Friday, 22.4. morning NP-induction for newcomers Friday, 22.4. after lunch beginning of NP-Annual-Meeting Sunday, 24.4. lunch end of the NP-Annual Meeting Sunday, 24.4. after lunch beginning of EN.CPS-Annual-Meeting Tuesday, 26.4. after lunch end of the EN.CPS-Annual Meeting Please keep these dates free on your appointment calendars and start to discuss with your organizations with how many people you are participating and who is going to represent you at the EN.CPS-Annual Meeting. We will soon send you further information about the best travel routes (closest airports, etc.) as well as prices for accommodation. With this second mail we will also ask you to preliminarily confirm your participation. This will help us to proceed with logistic questions and you will be able to start early enough to make your travel arrangements. Your organising team: As it was decided in Dunblane the main-co-ordination task for EN.CPS lies with me, assisted by Helga Tempel, co-ordinator of EN.CPS, also from forumZFD. Furthermore, most of you have already received an e-mail by Aurelien Tobie (aurelien007@nomade.fr), a co-student of mine in Wales who agreed to assist me in the practical work. If you have any queries, please feel welcome to get back to me and Aurelien. I also want to mention that we try to co-ordinate all the preparation as closely as possible with NP and PATRIR. Yahoogroup – mailinglist: Recently you have been invited to join a yahoogroup mailinglist which some of you have already done. This mailinglist has been set up to facilitate the information-flow for all of you who are planning to attend our Annual Meeting. In the current process we would like to use this tool mainly to pass on information to you. For now we kindly ask you to respond to me or Aurelien personally and not to the entire mailinglist. Please use the mailinglist only if your mailing really concerns everybody. For the future the idea is to have the yahoogroup as our general mailinglist for all organisations and individuals participating and/or interested in EN.CPS. Hopefully, this will make communication between the annual meetings easier to access and more efficient. As not all of you have followed the invitation yet to join the mailinglist Aurelien will send out another invitation to do so in the next days. Agenda-setting – get involved: We are also contacting you at this fairly early stage because we would like to collect your ideas for the setup of the Annual-Meeting’s programme. To get this process started please send us your ideas for content, topics, titles, etc. that you would like to see included. We will try to consider as many of your proposals as possible but please have in mind that following the handling of former annual meetings the last decision should be made by the organising team. The deadline for y is Monday, 13 December. We will then draft an agenda and send it out to you for your feedback. Funding: One promising potential funding source has indicated that a focus on aspects of internal-/societal conflict transformation might raise the possibilities to access funds. Please keep this in mind when sending your proposals but don’t let it limit your ideas on what you would like to see included on the agenda. We will try our best to find funding but of course cannot guarantee for success. Especially participants from Western European countries should therefore consider that very possibly you will have to pay for your own travel and accommodation costs. I am already looking forward to meeting you (in most cases again) and thank you for your co-operation to make the 2005 Annual Meeting a success! Best regards to all, Jochen Schmidt (forumZFD) TOP