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Launch of Los Bleedos International |   |
The WFH World Congress was the venue for the official launch of the Los Bleedos International website, which is an initiative started by the Danish Haemophilia Society.
By Christian Krog Madsen (cicero), editor of Los Bleedos
In April 2005 I was invited to submit an application to present at the 2006 WFH World Congress to be held in Vancouver, Canada. The topic of my presentation were to be the online network project that we had been running in the Danish Haemophilia Society for about 2 years. The project aimed to investigate how the internet could be utilized as a means of offering new ways to participate within the organisation. Specifically, we focused on getting young people involved and taking an active part. The primary product of the project was a website launched in October 2004. For a detailed history of the project, I refer you to an article elsewhere on this website.
When I received the invitation we began playing with the idea of creating an English language version of the website. Obviously, in English language we would be able to reach a large proportion of the world's haemophilia population and the World Congress would be the perfect stage for the official announcement. This was certainly an opportunity not to be missed. During the fall of 2005 we began planning and in the spring of 2006 the plan was implemented. In a frantic couple of weeks before the congress, I worked on sorting out the remaining technical issues, editing and publishing articles and creating the slideshow for my presentation.
Having previously mostly presented on academic subjects, it was quite a challenge to put the presentation together. It felt like I had so much to say about our experiences from 2½ years of successes, failures, hard work and fun in the project. However, with only 15 minutes allotted time, only the most relevant could be included.
The presentation was part of the session entitled "Recruiting Young People into National Member Organisations", which also featured presentations by Siddhartha Ojha from India on the work done by the Calcutta youth group and by Paul Bonner on the youth leadership and mentoring program being run in Australia.
The session was attended by an estimated 70-80 people and judging by the feedback we received at the end of the session, most found the presentations interesting.
For those interested, the slides from my presentation in Vancouver can be downloaded here (PDF format) and a transscript of the presentation is published on this site.
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