Beyond the Galaxy

This article originally appeared in print in the fifth issue (March 2009) of eXpress, the Erasmus Student Network Magazine.

A new ESN year, a new ESN webmaster. But you could spot from the beginning that 2006 was going to be a special year: for the first time in history, the ESN Website Working Group was meeting face-to-face, in Milan in June; and, equally unusual, the traditional “rebuilding the esn.org website from scratch” was nowhere to be found in the agenda.

More exciting stuff was in the works, indeed. Antonio, the new webmaster of ESN International, had understood his time would be better spent if he cared not only about the esn.org institutional website, but also about those couple hundreds small local and national websites that served as the business card of ESN to most students and local institutions. A quick scan of the existing websites showed this attention was severely needed, and Andrea and Peter joined Antonio to form the Webteam with the initial mission of improving local websites.

We instantly realized that the standardization of local websites on a common template would, one day, have allowed to aggregate data in a central system: hence the name of ESN Satellite for this website template, meant to be a part of a bigger system. The first milestone, ESN Satellite Beta, was presented at the CNR Koper in December 2006. After an enthusiastic acceptance by the National Representatives, ESN Satellite was refined until its first official release at the AGM 2007 in Prague; dozens of sections immediately adopted it.

The following year brought new and more interesting challenges. With a big percentage of the ESN sections switching to ESN Satellite or compatible technologies, the time had come to aggregate on one website the huge amount of information that had until then been visible only at the local level. The ESN Galaxy was thus born and it was successfully presented at the AGM 2008 in Besancon.

Yet another big challenge was waiting for us in 2008. After retiring from ESN, we founded a not-for-profit organization named Youth Agora, with the mission of innovating online information for youth in Europe and beyond. Christof, one of the National Representatives we had impressed in December 2006, joined us in this new adventure.

Youth Agora is now working with several established partners, such as ESN and the University Network UNICA, in big projects like European Campus, supported by the European Commission and aiming at promoting through online tools the Erasmus Mundus master's programs to students from outside Europe. We provide website templates for master's programs, conferences and projects, and we are still helping ESN as partners in web-related projects (Give20, ESN Radio, ESN Satellite 3). Best of all, the enthusiasm we had in 2006 still lasts!