We want to tell you so much about eSangathan

eSangathan is a two-year support action funded by the FP6 IST Research Programme. The proposal was submitted in Call 5 which was open between May 18, 2005 and September 21, 2005. The contract was agreed in August 2006 with Unit H3 from the European Commission Directorate General on Information Society and Media. The project started on October 1, 2006. It is ending September 30, 2008.

The purpose of eSangathan

The main objective of the eSangathan project is to study how innovative approaches based on an intensive use of ICT, particularly collaborative working environment or CWE, can generate ideas or perhaps models to answer the urgent European situation made out of low employment of older workers, shortage of critical skills and decline of birth rate in several countries. It is noticeable that the social and cultural attitude towards ageing workforce differs according to national social and economic history. Differences do also exist depending on the geographies.  As an example, in the Indian structured economy, where the business organisations compare with the Western organisations, aged workers are respected and can have the opportunity to continue to work after retirement age if they wish so.

Based on those facts, 3 major observations have inspired the eSangathan project:

• the level of employment of 50+ workers. It is far too low in Europe. According to Eurostat, the average level of employment of the 55-64 segment of workers is  44,7% in the EU-27 with a span going from 29,7% in Poland (Malta is even lower) to 70% in Sweden. The target set by the Lisbon and the i2010 strategy is 50% by 2010. Everybody knows this target will not be reached.
• the evolution of the information society. Nowadays ICT is available, affordable and becomes easier to use for the people who are not ICT-specialists. According to Internet World Stats, 48,1% of the Europeans are connected. This rate is increasing everyday which means that one can really rely upon the use of ICT for proposing advanced employment schemes. ICT can definitely play an "inclusion" role for aged workers while offering a better work/life balance. Especially when it comes to knowledge workers which is the segment eSangathan has concentrated on.
• the existence of different social models across the world in other geographies. They should play an inspirational role for Europe.

The role of the project has been to find out if those assumptions were making sense, how they could be implemented, which were the risks of failure, how far an how much ICT was an enabler and which lessons could be learned from the two pilots that have been implemented.

eSangathan working assumptions

The work done during two years was based on the few following key assumptions:

• the first one was the "a priori" point of view that ICT, and more particularly CWE, should be able to play an important and positive role for the inclusion of aged workers in the labour market
• the second was the view that the existing social model in India could be imported, adapted and implemented in Europe

And the idea was that the combination of those two assumptions could offer an attractive and useful solution to increase the number of active aged workers in Europe.

To verify and validate the assumptions, the eSangathan team has implemented two pilots. Each pilot had a very specific profile.

eSangathan working method

The life of the project has been divided in four 6-months periods corresponding to well defined milesones.

The first period from October 1, 2006 till March 31, 2007

This is the period during which the members of the consortium have become a team using common tools with a sharp learning curve for most of the tema members. It is also the period during which an agreement has been reached on the roadmaps and the methodological tools to be used for the pilots.  The communication actions were launched and an agreement was reached on the way the pilots would be implemented and managed.

The second period from April 1, 2007 till September 30, 2007

This period was twofold because of a cumulative action on the pilot selection process in the three countries: Sweden and Denmark for the Oresund pilot and in Mahindra & Mahindra for the Indian pilot. At the same time the selected members of the pilots started thier learning curve in the usage of collaborative working envirnoments (CWE) : Basecamp for the Oresund pilot and MS/SharePoint for the M&M pilot. During that same period the blogs were introduced in the consortium to replace the traditional website approach. VoIP and chat became widely used by most of the team members as well as by some of the pilot members; mainly by using Skype.

The profile of the two pilots was voluntarily totally different in order to test and validate the use of CWE in both contexts:

• the Oresund pilot was composed of individuals coming from very different places and situations with a common interest in getting more and better ICT-litterate with the hope that this would be a recognised advantage on the labour market. All of them were 55+ and willing to reposition themselves professionally.
• the M&M pilot was different; it was a corporate pilot. All the members do pertence to one or another division of the m&M group and they have a corporate culture. The pilot became the opportunity to sp^read the use of CWE to populations who were not yet familiar with those tools

A long time was devoted to the selection process, the team building process and the first steps on the CWE learning curve.

The third period from October 1, 2007 till March 31, 2008

This was a terribly busy period where the pilots were at work and where a lot of attention was paid to the learning path and the inclusion factors. The outside world was also moving fast with new Web 2.0 tools becoming more and more popular and stable. We introduced a social bookmarking system in addition to the blogs as well as the RSS feeds.The name of eSangathan had already gained a good visibility on Google and other search engines and the team started to participate to meetings and deliver presentations.

Time was also dedicated to prepare the fourth period for the evaluation of the pilots.

The fourth period from April 1, 2008 till September 30, 2008

This was an exciting period ! Both pilots were evaluated and the whole team learned from this evaluation process which was twofold:

• on the one side the evaluation in both pilots by the project leaders of the pilots
• on the other side from a CWE usage point of view thanks to an in-depth analysis of all the statistics. A detailed report is available online.

Further, the project has organised two international conferences where a lot of interest was raised thanks to the unique approch chosen by eSangathan : considering the ICT could be an inclusion factor for active aged workers.

The first conference was held in Mumbai (India) on April 17, 2008 and the material is available on the eSangathan dissemination wiki.

The second conference was held in Brussels (Belgium) on September 18, 2008  and the material is available on the eSangathan dissemination wiki.

It is also during this last period of the project that the team started to use the wiki technology.

Conclusion

The eSangathan consortium has the feeling to have reached the goal that was set at the beginning of the project. Findings can be found in the final report of the project and recommendations in the White Paper issued by the project.

The hope is now that the project was only a starting point and that the sharing of the findings will stimulate more people to speak up and continue the discussion with us thanks to the blog hereunder !

Blog

November 09, 2008

Examples of good practices