It is with great pleasure that I reinitiate the EDEN President’s Blog after a period of some intermission. The blog was started in 2007 by Alan Tait when he took office as President in Naples. With his typical vision and wisdom, Alan moulded the blog in such a way to make it a wonderful open journal of his presidency. He also started a tradition of inviting colleagues to contribute to the blog thus giving it a broader scope of EDEN’s leadership views and experiences.
After Alan, Morten Paulsen continued the blog. He gave it a more personal characteristic, writing his posts more as critical reflections and personal impressions on the ongoing developments in our field and also the people who have made them possible. All the blog posts produced in these two styles are still online and constitute a wonderful documentation on EDEN’s history and values.
The continuation of the President’s Blog gives therefore new life and possibly new meaning to a much powerful tool. A means for EDEN leadership to connect and stay connected with the network’s large and most diversified community. This President’s Blog should be more than just an individual journal. It can be also a platform for all those who play a role in EDEN’s governance to share impressions and reflections, discuss ideas and values, defend causes, test developments and evaluate experiences with the EDEN family, as Ingeborg Boe taught us to say, and all stakeholders in our field.
In order to achieve this, the EDEN President’s Blog will be integrated in the EDEN community’s communication environment and I’ll be inviting EC members and other colleagues to contribute on a regularly basis. This will be indeed EDEN’s leadership’s blog.
As stated above, by reinitiating the EDEN President’s Blog I’m following the work of the two great EDEN Presidents that preceded me, who are also very dear personal friends. In fact, Alan Tait gave a tremendous contribution to EDEN through the years. He was our President, chaired the NAP SC and was the Editor in Chief of EURODL for many years. Words cannot express fully what we owe him and what he represents to all of us. Morten is one of the pioneers in our field. His connection with EDEN also dates from the early nineties and as Alan he was an active President engaged in promoting positive change to our network.
I hope their powerful example will inspire us in this third cycle of the EDEN President’s Blog. I do hope you’ll enjoy this experience too!
