On May 11, the kick-off workshop for using the people tagging demonstrator as part of operational activities has taken place. Jenny Bimrose from University of Warwick and Simone Braun and Andreas Schmidt from FZI have introduced the people tagging system to an enlarged group of ten personal advisors at Connexions Northumberland after it had been substantially improved as a result of the participatory design phase with a core group from Connexions Northumberland.

Last week, the project has presented its results of the second year to the review panel. This encompassed the results of the representative studies and their implications on the knowledge maturing model as well as the demonstrator development, which brings together conceptual advances, architecture and integration work, and formative evaluation. The whole team has put tremendous effort in the preparation of the meeting, particularly because it was a very early project review.

We are proud to announce that our associate partner network has grown with two new partners from Portugal:

• Multicert 
• Maisis Information Systems

Representatives from those companies will join the associate partner meeting on April 16 in Vienna.

LEARNTEC is the leading international trade fair and convention for vocational education, learning and information technology. It provides information about different approaches to learning, using online and traditional media, which are both effective and free of time constraints.

At this year's edition, Prof. Rudi Studer, director at FZI and professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, was invited for a talk on Knowledge Management 3.0, in which he presented the MATURE approach and the people tagging demonstrator as a lightweight semantic approach to knowledge management.

MATURE organized a track at this year's edition of the Professional Training Facts conference, which is an "industry meets science" event targeted at "learning - competence - performance". The MATURE track was about continuous competence development, focussing on one of the main aspects of MATURE: the continuity of learning in organizations.

Andreas Schmidt represented MATURE and its approach to competency definitions at the informal IEEE LTSC WG20 meeting. Its goal was to establish a - standardization body independent - group that develops a shared understanding of competency data management. A position statement was presented and lively discussed:

At this year's edition of the International Conference on Knowledge Management (I-KNOW 09), the MATURE has taken the opportunity to raise the awareness of the community for MATURE and to present the first year's results.

On the first day, there was an entire session on knowledge maturing from an organizational perspective:

On July 2, 2009 LTRI (London Metropolitan University) hosted the successful MATURE Workshop on User Centred Requirements Processes for E-Learning and Knowledge Management – A European-Wide Perspective. The day enabled the cross fertilisation of ideas between MATURE and other key European projects, research centres and individuals. The formal presentations and discussions were of a high quality and the slides from these can be viewed by following the links for talks in the agenda (above). Furthermore, the informal discussion over coffee and lunch were insightful and wide-ranging.