IEFC Chairman and EFI ChairmanThe IEFC annual general meeting was organised in partnership with the University of Valladolid, and took place in Palencia, Thursday, March the 15th 2007.
It was chaired by the IEFC Chairman Inazio Martinez.
There were 21 delegates attending the assembly, representing 15 IEFC members. 1 associated member was present.

The meeting started by a talk from Inazio Martinez chairman of IEFC who presented the moral report of the IEFC for the year 2006. The main comments were: 2006 was a very good year for IEFC thanks to :

  • FORSEE that is a very good project providing a lot of results and lot of work. Thanks to FORSEE we have better visibility (contacts with NFI agencies…) and have improved fame of the network.
  • Bilbao Congress and Oporto Congress that were good meetings
  • IEFC-CONFOREST debate, was very interesting.
  • the DEFOR project has been approved by INTERREG SOE is a good news has it involves IEFC members that were not in FORSEE and assures continuity for the management team

The end of the chairman comments is available for all the IEFC members in the intranet.

IEFC Chairman and EFI SAB Chairman

The second part of the meeting was dedicated to an open discussion with SAB about how to improve interactions between EFI and Project Centres as IEFC. As the chairman of EFI board Konstantin von Teuffel gave a presentation on the structure of the new international EFI, many comments related to the new regional offices were also discussed and showed the perturbation induced by this structure in the regional networking. As a conclusion, more transparency in the development of regional offices and more information for project centres and associate members were called for.

As usual, this intense days ended in a convivial Spanish atmosphere merging SAB and IEFC members.