The project

ADUM is a project offering information on EU programmes relevant for the funding of minority language promotion projects. It includes an interactive networking environment, to aid the drafting of proposals

The ADUM project aims to offer people and organisations throughout Europe that work for the so-called “regional” or "minority" languages information on the European programmes that can be taken advantage of to (co)fund projects to promote these languages. Likewise, ADUM offers a virtual space to aid the drafting of European proposals by bodies and people working for over 60 linguistic communities in Europe. The project has received co-funding thanks to a call for proposals published by the European Commission, in the context of the Communication from the Commission, Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004–2006 (COM 2003 449 final of 24 July 2003).

The team

The team The partners in this project are the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Barcelona, Catalonia), the Research Centre on Multilingualism (Katholieke Universiteit Brussel, Brussels); the Centre for European Research, Wales; the Institute of Ethnic Studies (Institut za Narodnostna Vprasanja, Ljubljana, Slovenia); the International Centre for the Study of Plurilingualism (Centro Internazionale sul Plurilinguismo, Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy) and the independent consultant Dónall Ó'Riagáin from Ireland. Members of the team have worked together on other European projects, such as Euromosaic and Atlantis. The Adum initiative is part of the macro-project on cultural diversity in Europe led by the Europa Diversa Network.

The website

The ADUM website is available in English, French and German, and provides access to a database of potential European partners and consultants, and a useful list of research documents available on the Internet.

Visitors to the site are invited to join the list of potential partners and consultants, and will also find detailed advice in the form of:

• a manual on how to design a project proposal;
• information on the potential usefulness of numerous EU programmes and actions;
• a set of problem oriented case studies, when designing proposals for European projects; and
• an interactive forum which offers visitors the chance to work together to this end.

How to use the website

Follow these steps if you have an idea and want to develop it into a fully-fledged project proposal to present to the Commission with as high a chance of obtaining co-funding as possible. You are free to change the order of the steps if you need to search for special information to develop a project.

1. A short introductory text in the "Develop your proposal" section explains the steps to be followed.

2. You can then read a short chart-style presentation of the results of our "Community needs" analysis, which should enable you to identify the language communities whose priority needs are, in our opinion, consistent with your idea.

3. If you like, you can access and read at your leisure a much longer text which explains the theoretical grounding for our work, the steps we took, and the information we used, in order to develop the chart.

4. You will also have received from our document an idea of which EU programs, by subject area, might be suitable for funding your project. You can read through our "EU programmes" section which gives the basic information on each programme / action.

5. You should now have the basic information and are in a position to start developing your idea into a project proposal. You need appropriate tools to undertake this task. These basic learning resources will be the "Guidelines" and the "Case studies" (examples of real proposals) and the "Research database".

6. The "Guidelines" are contained in a fairly detailed document explaining the whole process (both technical and administrative), from a problem-solving perspective; and giving advice on both how to design a project and how to write the proposal. The logical framework approach - in a simplified format - has been chosen here for its clarity.

7. Now you will need some real examples. These are the "Case studies",each of which highlights some of the problems encountered in drafting real, project proposals actually co-funded under various EU programmes, and how they were dealt with.

8. To develop your proposal you may need background information, including addresses of regional EU offices. Some of this you can obtain through the "Research database".

9. Then, in order to look for suitable partners for your project, you can use the database of "Partners and experts" (which you invited to join, of course), and also make a specific call through our “forum”.

10. Once you have set up an initial team to draft the proposal and distribute the work packages and tasks in the proposal, you can either use the "Forum" or set up your own distribution list (e.g. through www.yahoogroups.com), so as to engage in collaborative knowledge construction, with the proposal as the end-product. You should find the “Guidelines” document, and the logical framework approach, very handy during this stage.

11. You are now ready to start. Good luck!