Editorial - March 2002

Do email roundtables work? In an age that so values global communication and has such faith in the Internet, this is a relevant question. When setting up the Alliance email roundtable featured in this issue, I had somehow assumed that it would be almost like having people sitting round a real table. It wasn’t.

If you are sitting round a real table, you are there for the time it takes. If you feel like responding to something, you respond. With an email roundtable, taking part inevitably jostles with 101 other things you have to do. Instead of responding at once, you watch and wait and at some point, hopefully, contribute. The result: high-quality, thoughtful contributions, but not a spontaneous exchange. With the Alliance roundtable, participants carried the extra weight of so to speak ‘representing’ a country, even a continent, knowing that what they said would be published. In those circumstances, who’d be spontaneous?

Thank you to all those who took part in Alliance’s first email roundtable.