Steering Committee Meeting of GCD in Segrate, Italy

Participating Members of the Steering Committee Meeting, Segrate, 10 March 2009

GCD-Steering Committee Meeting (SCM) took place in the beautiful region of Lombardy in Segrate, Italy, on 9 & 10 March, and was hosted by Mr Adriano Alessandrini, mayor of the city of Segrate and GCD-Vice-President for Europe and Middle East.

Over these two days, the agenda of this event reflected the broad spectrum of activities carried out within the GCD framework. The participants exchanged their experiences made in the fields of ICT and education and started the debates on Green IT. The Vice-chairmen for the regions presented their action plan at the regional level and projects to be established for 2009 - 2010.

This year several special events took place during the Steering Committee Meeting:

• a Signature Ceremony of the Helsinki Declaration was organized at the "Pinacoteca di Brera" in Milan on the evening of 9 March 2009.
  
  This time the City of Dolisie (Congo) joined the Global Cities Dialogue by signing the official document in this historical location (the picture behind is the "Sermon of St. Mark in Alexandria" painted by Giovanni Bellini), making it the first member coming from Central Africa.
  

• For the launch of the multimedia room of the city of Segrate on 10 March 2009, two co-operation agreements have been officially signed:

for Digital Solidarity between the cities of Rufisque (Senegal) and Segrate (Italy)

between the non-profit making organization "Senegal und Freunde", a Senegalese diaspora association based in Bremen (Germany) and the Global Cities Dialogue.

Another key moment of this meeting was the approval of the General Assembly Meeting to be hosted by the city of Helsinki in November 2009 on the occasion of GCD's 10th anniversary. On this occasion GCD will launch a new official web site enabling the network to take advantage of the latest open internet tools.