by Rana Gaber & Mohamed Hassan

Introduction:

The CEC III conference comes to continue on what the previous two conferences, in Egypt and Tunisia, accomplished. The special nature of CEC III lies in the fact that it was a collective effort in terms of its organization by the NACE Executive Board and Advisory Board in their individual capacities as well as bringing in their organizational capacities on board. The next few pages will be outlining the purpose, methodology, and process with which the conference proceeded, in addition to the planned agenda versus what actually happening on the ground, and finally outlining the content that was generated by the conference from executive summaries of the discussions within the workshops and the voted upon recommendations.

 The purpose, Methodology, and Process:

The purpose of the conference has been developed over the different meetings of the NACE Executive Board (EB) and Advisory Board (AB) since April 2018. The different documents that outline the conference purpose, methodology, and process are the following:

• NACE CEC concept note was developed by the CEC working group to outline the purpose of the conference and was used later one as a stepping stone for the methodology, agenda, and process.
• The workshops description developed by the CEC content group

The methodology started by first outlining the difference between the different components of the conference; from the stakeholders/experts meeting, the conference itself, and the training of trainers. The training of trainers was an pre-conference event taking place in parallel to the stakeholders meeting and was organized by Goethe Institute. While the participants of the training of trainers attended the conference itself they have not attended the stakeholders/experts meeting. The purposes and links between the stakeholders/experts meeting and the conference were outlined clearly in the document titled “Experts meeting and conference” that can be accessed here.This document uses the metaphor of the rocket, where the experts meeting here represents the base on which the rocket, in this case the conference, is resting before it launched. The documents strengthens the links between both meetings and guarantees the flow of information from the two meetings. From the links mentioned above the agenda was developed to include, some plenary sessions that are mainly targeting the joint activities, panel discussions, or keynote speeches that are address all the participants. It also includes 10 different workshops that the participants signed up for in their application process. And finally, the spaces where the participants are actively engaged to showcase their work and contribute to the networking and strengthening their links; namely the project market, the share your story, the recommendations, world cafe, and the open space.

The different stakeholders who were involved with the content creation were the Content Manager, the Content Manager Assistant, the MC, the NACE Coordinator, the Workshop facilitators, the Advisory Board Focal points to the workshops, the speakers, and the Consultant of the Stakeholders/Experts meeting. The below documents outline the different roles of the content stakeholders:

1. The organization of the different roles, it can be accessed
2. The workshop guidelines, it can be accessed

The preparation of the workshop process happened through meetings between the MC, the content manager, and the content manager assistant. While the preparation of the facilitators happened through skype calls organized by the content manager with the participation of the facilitators and the focal points, followed by the facilitators sending of the workshops designs that could be found here. And finally within the frame of the stakeholders/experts meeting a preparation meeting for the facilitators that was held by the content manager assistant.

The Participants: 

The participants of the workshop were applying through an online application that was administered by Lab concepts, who later one shared the final list and applications with the Executive Board. During the Berlin Advisory Board meeting a selection committee was developed that included some members of the Executive Board and the Advisory Board who took upon themselves the responsibility of developing selection criteria, getting back to the rest of the NACE EB and AB members for recommendations, and have a final list for the participants that was shared with Lab concepts for continuing with the logistics.

Below are some important statistics regarding the participants of the main conference:

(many participants did not apply through the online application, speakers, partners, special guests, NACE,      CENESA, EENCE,   organisers) but were added via separate channels.)