Dear colleagues,
I need your help to make a decision for the proposed meeting "DC
Standardisation in Europe".

To refresh you, the idea was to organise a meeting to share experiences and
promote cooperation among national initiatives in Europe related with some
kind of standardisation actions of the DCMES or related with the DCMI...
I was convinced for this by several people after discussions held before,
during and after DC-8. This came also after the end of the first phase of
the CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata (MMI-DC), where this issue was addressed.
In that sense I proposed to organize the meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, for
the 1-2 February, just before the DC-AC meeting that will be held in
Madeira, Portugal, during 3-4 February, and so I announced it like that (I
proposed Lisbon for practical reasons, assuming that only a few DC-AC
members would be present on it, and that we'd attract much external
participants fom whom it'd be easier the traveling, including for the
Portuguese participants).

Meanwhile we learned that the European Commission decided to continue
supporting the MMI-DC Workshop, which is for me a wonderful thing, making
the potential of this meeting much more relevant.

However, I'm not sure if it is working... First, and for several reasons, it
was decided here to organise, latter on, a specific Portuguese meeting about
this, so it is not relevant anymore to expect a strong Portuguese presence.
Second, even if immediately after the announce of the meeting I received
lots of replies of the kind "I'm interested but I'll have to check if I can
do it...", so far we have only these confirmations:

Yes:
+ José Borbinha, National Library of Portugal
+ Thomas Baker, GMD - Portugal
+ Leif Andresen,  Royal Library of Denmark
+ Luc Van den Berghe, CEN/ISSS - Information Society Standardization System,
Belgium
+ Ian Campbell-Grant , CEN/ISSS / ICL, UK

Still working for it:
+ Mikhail E. Shvartsman, Russian State Library
+ Stina Degerstedt, Royal Library of Sweden
+ Carola Wessel, Projekt META-LIB, Niedersaechsische Staats und
Universitaetsbibliothek Goettingen - Germany
+ Zuzana Repisova Masaryk University - Czech Republic

All of this makes it, 4 weeks before the proposed date, a very poor scenario
for an interesting meeting...

In this sense, I'm bringing the problem to the community, to ask for your
advise, especially for those of you that might be still thinking about it.
My proposal is now to move the meeting from Lisbon to Madeira (which looks
OK for the names above and may make it interesting to the other DC-AC
members), but we are still facing a problem of lack of quorum... In this
sense, and unless we have a change in the scenario in the next 3 or 4 days,
I'll be forced to cancel this meeting :-(

Any reply is welcome!

Thanks very much,
Jose Borbinha