Project Events

A partnership working across nine countries met in person, and the EA-Fitness project's own page recorded its meetings in the order it held them.

• 1st Partner Meeting: London, 22-23 October 2009
• 2nd Partner Meeting: Lisbon, 16-17 February 2009
• 3rd Partner Meeting: Brussels, 15-16 June 2009

Transnational meetings were more than administration in a project of this kind. The standards had to be applied the same way in every partner country, and the way to keep that true was to put the people doing the accreditation work in the same room, compare what they had found in their own markets, and agree the documents that came out of it. A framework written in one country and applied in nine is where most standards projects fail; the meetings were how this one checked that it was not happening.

They were also where the partnership did its planning. The project had work packages running in parallel - accreditation in each country, the revision of the standards, the translations, the research - and the meetings were the points at which they were brought back together and the next stage agreed.

The three meetings fell in three of the partner countries - the United Kingdom, Portugal and Belgium - rather than in a single host city. The project's own events page listed those three meetings and nothing else; the final conference is recorded separately, in the association's news archive rather than on that page.

The project closed with its European Final Conference in Brussels, the event at which its results were presented to the sector. EHFA carried the event in its news archive under 6 July 2010, and the record includes the project's own news article, Final Conference, EA-Fitness Project. The three partner meetings are all dated 2009 on the project's page and the conference follows the next year; the dates are reproduced here as the project recorded them.

The conference was also the destination in the prize draw attached to the project's 2010 employer survey: the project offered to fund five fitness employers to attend it in Brussels. EHFA announced that survey in July 2010.

For a project that ran on documents and meetings rather than on a product anyone could buy, the dates are the record. They show a partnership working through three meetings in its first year, with the accreditation documents and the translations it set itself listed among its products, and closing with a conference at which the work was presented to the sector. The project page describes what it set out to do, and the association's wider event programme, which ran on its own calendar, is listed under EHFA events.