It was short, sweet and intense. 14 steering board members from North Macedonia, Kosovo, Canada, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia, Latvia, Georgia, Albania, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro gathered to discuss the future of the project and attend the Bled Strategic Forum on 29 and 30 August 2022.
On the first day, we reflected the history of the project and talk about ideas for the future. After the fruitful discussion, we continued with a meeting with the representatives of Jigsaw, a unit within Google that explores threats to open societies and builds technology that inspires scalable solutions. Attending the opening of the Bled Strategic Forum was next on the agenda. Steering board members had a chance to listen to the interesting discussions about the future of Europe and the most pressing contemporary challenges in the world such as the war in Ukraine and the Energy Crisis. We wrapped the day with a networking dinner, which was a part of the forum’s agenda.
The second day was kicked off by the meeting with a Global Engagement Center (GEC) representative, Mr Jani Vujica, followed by the meeting with Mr Gabirel Escobar, Deputy Assistant Secretary at the US Department of State. After lunch, we jumped right into the Bled Strategic Forums’ panel “Communication for Cohesion: Proactive Strategies to Defeat Disinformation”. Our busy schedule continued with a presentation by Jozef Stefan Institute on the Event Registry platform that can analyse new articles and identify them mentioned world events. We concluded the forum by listening to a panel “The politics of content: A battle for narratives” and the Steering Board meeting with a dinner.
The meeting will take place on the side of the Bled Strategic Forum, a project of the Government of the Republic of Slovenia, which is organised jointly by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia and the Centre for European Perspective. The meeting is organized by the Centre for European Perspective together with the U.S. Department of State.