Who are we trying to engage?

The people and groups that can make a difference. Among them:

• Regional and local government who, in our book, are among the most likely to emerge as champions of new work projects and implementations... including not least in distressed areas that really have no alternative but to innovate radically or slowly and fatally decline.

• Large corporations, and especially those who are shedding labor and who, instead of just casting aside this important human infrastructure should be working with all these people and resources to find new directions and new kinds of organization to increase wealth and well being within their communities. This of course is a huge challenge, not because it would be so hard for them to do some very interesting and creative things when it comes to reconcatenating and energizing these "excess" resources, but rather what has to happen first in the minds and hearts of the senior managers and the stockholders behind them. but there too, perhaps the greatest challenge is to break the mold and provide models of success in these alternative approaches.

• Small businesses, though from their perspective this is a much harder row to hoe, as much as anything because of a paucity of resources and limited support for anything other than economic survival according to all the old formulas, at best, or gradual aging and decline, in all too many cases.

• The cooperative and volunteer movement, who now have an opportunity to come out of the wings and on to center stage.

• Public interest groups and associations (including those who are concerned with poverty and exclusion)

• Organized labor, who are here and there gradually pushing ahead in new thinking in many of these areas, often against considerable internal opposition. Still, they are emerging as among the major players in the rethinking process that is now going on (in altogether insufficient intensity and quality, however)

• The academic and research community in all its many parts, who thus far have by and large been securely niched within the ranks of respectable thinking and policy, rather than making a vigorous contribution to the new thinking that is required and which many of them are so well equipped to support.

• Foundations, as sources of financial support, counsel, contacts and guidance to make sure that we are putting our energies into directions which are going to be concretely useful to real people and places.

• National governments and their institutions with a variety of mandates (work, social affairs, technology, education, quality of life, economic and regional development, etc.), and in particular those who are willing to reach out for new approaches

• The European Commission, and in particular the new Office of the President of the Commission, the many programs of DG V - Employment & Social Affairs New Ways of Working Program (DG XIII), Information Society, ), the Forward Studies Unit, and -- all of whom we think are exceptionally well placed to put some fire to the debate and to lay the base for far more experimentation and better exchanges across Europe of information on successful, alternative experiences and approaches in the world of work. They have the resources and the mandate, but need, however, to make a major pattern break first.

• The European Parliament, whose approach thus far has been one of rather sleepy periodic interest and debate, with little concrete accomplishment. But whose potential to emerge as a major force not only at the Europe level but on the world stage is very great indeed.

• The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris -- despite the fact that they have consistently and insistently remained within the box on the work issues which, by definition, require out-of-box thinking. The OECD could develop into an important carrier of the new messages, but it must first of course come to understand them (and to practice them, themselves).

• The unemployed and poor themselves, who, if only they can find ways to group their forces, can do a great deal to bring into being the new Renaissance in work that is now so desperately required.

• And, of course, you!

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A few things @Work can do for you

1. @Work on the Web offers a fully independent, non-official, non-bureaucratic, non-aligned source of information, views and critical opinion.

2. The forum serves as an activist international source of innovative ideas, information and contacts in its chosen area.

3. If you are active in these areas, @Work offers a multi-function communications center and tool kit to support and internationalize your activities, inputs and impacts.

4. It offers you and your colleagues around the world an interactive forum which has set out to incite and support the very widest range of views and approaches - in the knowledge that there are no easy answers to these problems, and that the best responses are going to be those that are hammered together as a result of exchanges and conflict resolution among those most directly involved.

5. You have here a handy place to announce, test and get critical feedback on your ideas and plans -- whether set out in the form of informal working notes, brainstorming pieces, essays, reports, or multimedia materials.

6. The @Forum provides a means for quickly accessing information and materials on these matters that may be taking place in language groups to which you do not have easy access (via the machine translation capabilities that exist both in simplified public version in the site itself, as well as back in The Commons in a much more sophisticated and powerful variant. Thus if, for instance, you have a newsletter or other occasional publication which presently exists only in French, Spanish, Italian, German or Portuguese, we can possibly run a machine translation for you and present the results in handy two column form so that they run as a reading aid for those who do not master that language.)

7. Consider making use of these capabilities as a conference or event support system with which you may want to consider working if you are planning something along these lines and are interested in making use of the tools and approach that are set out here.

8. You can also use the forum to organize an audio or real time text conference on your own or with the group as a whole. The standard procedure is to set a time and date, create a conference group, either post of send them by email a paper or multi-media presentation that is to be discussed in the meeting, post the agenda, appoint a moderator, and then go on the air with your presentation and the follow-up discussion and question session. All this without leaving your desk.

9. The Commons can also serve as a means for getting support for a project or an idea, including international partners to help in the organization of events, pilot projects or proposals (such as for the various specialized programs of the European Commission which are open to international teams).

You may have some ideas about this yourself. We hope that you will share them with the group. There may be others who can profit from your creative thinking, insights and information.

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Ten things you can do to contribute

1. Send in information on links to leading articles, reports and media materials which can be placed in the Links/Media section for others to conveniently access and work with. (If you have any questions about how to do that once you have checked the rather good guidelines on that page, please get in touch.)
2. Write or propose an Essay of the Month... and/or have a look at the latest one and let us have your best thoughts on it.
3. Join the New Work Discussion Forum, listen to what people have to say, contribute usefully and modestly yourself, suggest and contact others who should be adding their ideas and weight to these discussions and the issues behind them.
4. Let us have your nominations and links for Out of Work Case Studies and associated media materials, as well as leads to New Work Innovations and actual project deployments.
5. Challenge and critique the reports and working papers that are being developed and posted here -- including not least of which the in-process rewrite of Rethinking Work
6. Suggest and help put us into contact with groups and programs who share these interests and concerns.
7. Invite us to participate in workshops, public meetings, conferences, etc., where we can present these ideas to critical audiences and profit from their reactions, discussions, and views (especially where they are not in agreement with us or, better yet, way ahead of us in their thinking and actual practices).
8. Help us locate publishers in different languages for the revised and expanded version of Rethinking Work.
9. Provide financial support and technical assistance for this Web site and the work program behind it.
10. Have a look at what is going on here, and if it passes your tests why not take a moment to inform other colleagues, programs, teams, and specialised Discussion Lists about Rethinking Work on the Web.

AND TELL US WHAT you don't like, or think we should be trying to do or do better. This is being run as a cooperative group project. So, if you have critical remarks, ideas or suggestions for us, this is the place to turn.

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