breaking the ice

I have just attended a conference organised by the Congress of local and regional authorities and the Council of Europe, the title was “Social Cities, needs for disadvantaged neighbourhoods”

I was in a panel which was about the partnership triangle between research, youth work and policy makes; noticing that all the speakers were male researchers (30 min speaking time), all the respondents were females from NGOs and no policy makers were present.
Can you all clearly see the partnership?
Basically everyone who was at the conference in the capacity of NGO or in the capacity of Researcher was in this penal on the triangle.
But if they (and almost all of them were there) would have taken into account the Luxemburg results, where a whole 3 days seminar on the research partnership took place, researchers and NGOs would have been in all the panels.

Whilst all the male oldies, who work with each other for a while and would not have needed to meet here to continue their ongoing discussions, which is in addition ridiculous, as they were talking about the same things as in Luxemburg and by anyway agreeing largely with each other (they mainly kept making references to each other - male network at it's best) the young females who were there to represent NGOs got 5 min speaking time each!

All other people who were not in Luxemburg felt left out and excluded and did basically not contribute to the discussions at all.

The biggest loss is that there were such interesting people attending the conference, with such a variety of experiences and practises that we could have all benefited from! But no chance for interaction as it was totally frontal; all this local people from projects who could have shared so much from their programmes did not even manage to speak at all; no exhibition place nothing; just a big waste of time.

Knowing the gang of the old youth policy researchers, I did not learn much new. One of them as speaker and the other bringing their indeed good ideas into the other panels would have been wonderful!

Pity that the researchers and NGOs did not get to attend all different kids of panels and that all the not so regular European conference attendance had not change to get the word in the formal framework of the conference.