Hey everyone I hope all of you guys have begun to get over the post EASA blues now that we are 2 weeks out and almost fully re-assimilated into the ‘real world’ and for those of you that couldn’t make it bad luck. Firstly I’d just like to say a huge congratulations and thank you to all of the Italian organisers. I can only imagine how difficult it was to organise an event in the current economic climate and to have put together such a successful meeting is a real credit to all of you guys. All that remains now is to have yo’selves a good party and relax a little/lot.

Secondly hopefully feeding off of everyone’s post EASA love I am looking to start a series of threads on the blog leading on from the ‘Future of EASA discussion’ held at this year’s event. The aim of these discussions is to get everyone to put forward their opinion on certain matters that will no doubt be discussed at the INCM in Liechtenstein. It should also help form agendas and topics for meetings at the INCM. This will hopefully allow for a much broader input into the INCM but also facilitate more focused discussions during the actual event. Each thread will have a general theme, such as EASA Spirit (something commonly discussed but ill defined as to what it could mean) EASA and its context (people feel that it has become a tenacious link in recent times) EASA Finance(in harder economic times how should the finances of EASA work) and other topics. The idea being that a new topic for discussion would be posted on the blog every few days to a week in the run up to the INCM. I’m suggesting as a starting point for each discussion that I will put my thoughts about the issue down and people can then add to, disagree with or totally reject them and put their own views forward.

Obviously suggestions for topics of discussion are more than welcome and necessary but I ask that they are somewhat controlled so that we don’t just overload the blog with hundreds of threads. So if anyone has suggestions I would ask that they are sent to me at patterson.neal@gmail.com (so that I can take credit for any good ideas!!!) and then they can be either included in a topic that they are relevant to or started as a new thread and then give people some time to think about and respond to them.

Now all I ask you guys to do is go to the get involved (and possibly have a read of the EASA guide, if you haven’t already done so). I hope to hear from most of you guys on this and for those people that didn’t get this let them know.

Keep your eyes on it

Neal