ESEAP Hub/Interim Committee Workshop/16 April 2023
The ESEAP Hub Interim Committee convened a workshop to dive into areas for collaboration and the strategy of the ESEAP hub following the outcome of previous discussions within the region, and have used some key points from the Community Engagement Survey Analysis and the Hub sessions report from ESEAP Conference 2022 as their references for their discussions.
The workshop covered a recap of the draft goal of the ESAP Hub - which was drafted at the ESEAP Conference 2022 with participants’ consensus, and the Interim Committee dived into the breakdown of all key areas from the draft goal: Representation, Communication, Transparency, and Support for ESEAP communities.
In the second part of the workshop, the Interim Committee had their discussions surrounding areas for collaboration - discussing the strategy of the Hub, by going through the main priority areas identified by community members from the community engagement survey. The Committee went through each area by discussing the urgency and significance of each and aiming to reach a consensus on proposing the first functions the Hub should focus on. In short, the key points from the discussion can be summarized below:
- Resourcing facilitation (financial and human resources): Focus on having ESEAP Hub staff and building a good flow of support process to ensure well communications and engagement - where a helpdesk can be a format where community members can come to ask for support. The aim is to achieve access to administrative, legal, finance, governance and translation support through this process.
- Representation of ESEAP in Global Discussion: acknowledging the significance of ESEAP being represented in global movement bodies and conversations, yet agreeing to de-prioritize for the time being until the Hub has its internal processes in place. It also makes sense to wait for the global discussions relating to global movement bodies to progress.
- Skill Development Across the Region: Identifying leadership training, simple user training and cross–community cooperation and skill sharing as urgent needs, with the goal to develop strong editing communities and affiliates, including new ones.
- Regional Partnership Development: Not something for the interim committee to focus on in the short term, but leaving it to once the Hub is up and running properly.
- Regional Events and Activities: competitions are not necessarily helpful for maintaining long-term editors, but beneficial for ensuring new users. Communities use language and local meetups as venues to brainstorm new ideas and maintain activity levels in their local communities, and it may be beneficial to ensure Hub leadership attends these events.
In sum, the consensus within the Interim Committee is that the ESEAP Hub should first focus on having a help desk and support in capacity building, as well as looking into communication functions and the support of regional events and activities. The next step of the Interim Committee is to map the core functions with priorities identified, which all need to refer back to the draft goal of the ESEAP Hub as a guiding point. The Interim Committee will incorporate the expected role (“What”) of the ESEAP Hub into the roles and responsibilities document they are currently drafting, before proceeding with wide community review by the ESEAP community.