Memo March 2000

A memo sent to correspondents, friends and acquaintances of the Budapest Observatory (BO) in March 2000

 

Dear Daniela, Dorota, Eva, Katrin, Oskar and Vesna,

18 March
That meeting was a success. The Festival Centre prepared it professionally and with heart. Those who participated could gather important knowledge, contacts and had a pleasant time. Including those five, who were generously invited be the Spring Festival on BO recommendation: you two, Dorota and Vesna, as well as Ainiki, Andras and Olinka.

As a follow-up to that meeting we decided to collect information on the EU cultural contact points in the pre-accession countries and keep record of their developments. Obviously, where there are no special indtitutions for this purpose as yet, we shall identify the interim contacts. Which probably is a desk in the cultural ministry. In my next memo you will find the first samples on the web. Or, already before that, I shall eddress you asking for information.

10/11 April
The gender composition of those, who are coming to this conference on Culture and regionalism as BO guests, speakers or participants, is different from the previous occasions. Here are the names: Alexander, Alexandra, Charles, Cornelia, Ernest, Oskar, Ryszard, Sylvia, Theodossios and Vojko. The zero-hit tradition with Czechia continues, in our first year of existence, no contact has been reached with that republic.

I very much hope that this meeting will produce ideas for our activity and assistance also.

Best Practices
It is indeed time for the rapid growth of this collection. I feel guilty every time I look at the two items on our web site. At this early stage we need not care about balances of cultural sector or type of case. Please, look around and help me find interesting cases and people ready to do the presentation. (In English, for €500.)

Donors' tax incentives
This project took a promising second start. I have four signed contracts (Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania and Poland) and a few more promises. Yet more is needed. There is a preliminary agreement with the Council of Europe that one of the next Mosaic seminars will be partly based on the findings of this project, as early as June.

Arm's length
Still very one-sided, with contributions from Australia and Canada but almost nothing from our region. If you have not done so, please take another look at the collection and try to find someone in your country who will send me an e-mail with the answers to the 7 questions. (Which are there on the site.)

Board meeting
The supervisory board and the board of trustees of our mother foundation are having meetings in the following days. I am confident that they will approve of the main lines of our report of the past year and the proposed plan for 2000. W shall let you know of the result.

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