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I. e-Forums

… are “remote” meetings

An e-forum or work list1 can be compared to a meeting, with a place, participants, topics to be discussed, objectives, and specific working methods.

… with deadlines and products

The difference with a meeting is that a forum or work list does not have a per-day time schedule. On the other hand, it must have a purpose, a calendar, deadlines, and an expected outcome, to be fixed in terms of its relevant agendas and in agreement with the members of the group. As for a face-to-face meeting, you can either present some of these elements and have them amended/validated by the participants, or you can actually determine some or all of these elements collectively, with the participants.

… and working languages

A forum also has working languages and, instead of using interpreters, provides translation with the assistance of machine-translation software (to save time and costs).

Your role, as facilitator, is to make sure that all these elements are explicit, known, and complied with.


1 In the present Guide, we use several terms to designate more or less the same thing:
- “forum” or “e-forum” refers to the open-debate aspect
- “discussion list” designates its technical aspect while also highlighting its interactive dialogue aspect
- "work list" refers the use of this media for a work group constituted by persons not living in the same area
- “mailing list” designates its technical aspect as required for the simple “publication of messages to the attention of all subscribed persons” (not interactive, appropriate for a newsletter)

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