Meeting of Minds Events
Upcoming events
Second European Citizens' Convention on Brain Science, 20-23 January 2006
Policy advice workshops and dissimenation events, Spring 2006
Previous events
Second National Citizens' Assessment Meeting, October - November 2005
First National Citizens' Assessment Meetings, September - October 2005 REPORTS
First European Citizens' Convention, 3-5 June 2005 REPORTS
The 126 citizens will come together again in Brussels and produce a 'European assessment' of brain science, focusing on commonalities and differences, the underlying values, differences between European countries and regions, gender differences and so on. This will be submitted to European policy-makers at a special event attended by the press and public. The European assessment report with recommendations will be handed over to high-level European officials and representatives of the European scientific and research community at a public ceremony.
These events will be organised by the European and national project teams to maximise the outcomes of the Meeting of Minds process: from in-depth discussions with key stakeholders to national festivals open to the public. Willing citizens can play a key role during these events.
The second national assessment meeting, which was the third and last meeting of the national panels in their country, kicked in with a first meeting in the United Kingdom starting on 14 October and ended with parallel meetings in France and Germany on 27 November 2005.
During these meetings, the citizens' panels expanded the discussions from their previous national meeting. They raised specific questions with the experts and policy-makers who had been selected to take part. Working in this way, the participants slowly gathered the information needed to draw up their national citizens' assessment reports. These reports include the panels' observations, opinions and recommendations for both the national and the European agenda. At the end of the meetings, panelists presented and discussed the results of the assessment process with stakeholders, policy makers, the media and the public.
The second national assessment meetings were open to the public (click
here for the dates of the meetings). In the case of Belgium, the two language communities jointly presented their findings to parliament on 12 November 2005.
Read some recollections on the assessment meetings held between 14 October and 21 November 2005.
Between 2 September and 9 October 2005, the national citizens’ panel members have been meeting in their countries to further study and discuss the common themes identified during the First European Citizens’ Convention. The presence of national resource persons, who are active in the field of brain science, allowed them to obtain extra insight into the themes, and in particular hold discussions on them in their national context. Throughout the weekend, the citizens’ panels have drawn up questions they would like to submit to specific experts, stakeholders and policy-makers in the next assessment meeting. At the end of the meeting, panelists identified the profiles of these experts.
Reports from these meetings can be accessed from
here.
The 1st European Citizens’ Convention on Brain Science formed the first step at European level of a longer process aimed at setting the European agenda for brain research. from 3 to 5 June, in total 123 citizens from the 9 participating countries got together in Brussels and identified the following themes to explore in greater depth in the national discussions between September and November 2005, and the second European Convention in January 2006:
- Regulation and control
- Normalcy versus diversity
- Public information, education and awareness
- Pressure from economic interests
- Equal access to treatment
- Freedom of choice
You can find the agenda of the First European Citizens' Convention
here.
More information on the composition of the European Citizens' Panel, the European Citizens' Deliberation process, how the Convention worked, and what the citizens have identified as themes and questions for further deliberation, can be found in the report on the First European Citizens' Convention. You can download a pdf version of the report
here.
An interim report which integrates the results from the different discussion rounds, as well as the framing of the issues at stake in the field of brain science can also be downloaded
here. The report serves as an input into the parallel national citizens’ assessment meetings held in each of the nine participating countries between September and November 2005.