Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the 8th DbI European Conference, which took place in Lille (France), the team members of the project “European Deafblind Indicators” joined together in the facilities of the Grand Palais Congress Centre, in Lille (France), on Saturday 24th August, the day before to the conference.
This meeting opened the second stage of the project, with the participation of 21 attendees. Once the first stage has already been done, which was focused on the definition and writing of the European Deafblind Indicators, the new stage starts with the distribution of a questionnaire regarding the most relevant indicators of each category. The aim is to distribute this questionnaire between specialised organizations on the scope of the deafblindness in many different states as long as we can ensure the appropriate gathering of information.
The pieces of information obtained will allow the development of a European comparative study about the degree of attention received by the collective. The results will be collected in a book, whose results will be presented in Barcelona in June 2014.
In this way, the meeting was focused on these two main points: the closing of the final details of the questionnaire, which will see the light in early October, and the distribution of tasks relating to the writing and production of contents, which are destined for the book. Also, we had time for other issues, as the presentation of the outreach material created for the project, which has as a slogan “Make a noise about deafblindness across Europe”.
Besides, we took advantage of this chance to present the project in three Working Groups and in a Network Session of the DbI Conference, from Sunday 25th to Wednesday 28th August. This was useful to disseminate the project and for gathering opinions and new contributions of the attendees regarding the project and on how we can reach its adequate adaptation to our aims.