Annual reports | Page 4

Foreword 2015 has been a special year for our organisation, marked by the election of a new Board early in February and a mid-term review of our Strategy 2013-2017 that led to releasing a Strategic Roadmap intended to guide the work of our organisation during the mandate of this Board until early 2017. While its 5-Pillar model was ratified, some hot issues were explicitly added to our agenda. This way, to our ongoing effort to build the capacity of telecentres and their e-Facilitators, and to align their training offer to European standards (namely DIGCOMP), we will focus on youth employability, newcomers (i.e. refugees, migrants) integration and civic e-participation – which by the way is in consonance with the Post-Paris agenda resulting from the recent revision of the EU strategy Education & Training 2020. This year we created a repository of resources for e-Facilitators and developed guidelines for our members to ease their understanding and adoption of DIGCOMP. We started to explore the worlds of coding and mobile through CODEMOB project and the Code Your Future campaign, both kicked-off in autumn. When it comes to youth, we have launched the I-LINC platform to enhance the collaboration between formal education (represented by European Schoolnet) and digital inclusion sectors with the common goal of improving the employability of European youth. We have produced a longitudinal analysis of the data collected through Skillage since 2012. Still on skills for jobs we supported FIT4JOBS project where 6 of our members are involved. Regarding civic e-participation, we ran for the first time our branded European e-Participation Day in 11 countries in May as part of E-UROPa project, concluding with a conference at the European Parliament in December. Refugees emerged as a burning social issue during the year, so in 2016 we will look for targeted solutions to facilitate their integration building over the experience of members serving migrants. Digital training, inclusion and empowerment are of course transversal to our overall strategy, and for this reason Get Online Week continues to be our flagship campaign, which received the endorsement of VP Ansip and other relevant members of Juncker Commission. On the advocacy front, our recognition by European institutions and peer organisations continued to expand, thanks to our engagement in the Secretariat of the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs and the EC’s e-Skills for Jobs campaign; our signature of Riga’s e-Skills declaration with other 5 networks and our support to Latvian presidency during the first semester; our increasing involvement as a EC social and expert partner in digital skills and trai