CLIMATE:  Using social learning among engineers and other actors to fight CLIMATE changes and challenges

Climate change may well be the biggest threat that humankind has ever faced. Extensive climate changes may alter the living conditions of masses of people, induce large-scale migration, and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. A growing awareness of these threats in the international community has prompted governments to discuss initiatives aimed at combating climate change. The European Union has set far-reaching goals in the years to come. To meet and overcome the climate challenges and achieve the European objective; we need to bring together the best people in the field - on a much larger scale than present. By developing and implementing an online social networking system the project aims at creating the foundation for a self organizing and sustainable learning community/network of European engineers within the field of environmental engineering. Based on open web 2.0 technologies the systems will support knowledgesharing and knowledge creation on a cross-European level with emphasis on resource linking, easy content access/sharing and innovative collaborative learning in large-scale social networks. Knowledge creation and sharing of resources will not be limited to network members; by also providing resources in machine extractable and readable formats the network can link in to the wider data and information spaces with the help of evolving semantic web standards.