Within few years, significant social, organisational and economical changes as well as a relentless technology evolution will lead the way of working for the Professionals into a dramatic change. More and more people, employed or independent, will rely for their work mainly on the information and communication technologies – they will become eProfessionals.

People will no longer work according to chain production models but rather more as dynamically and spontaneously assembled groups of people working together in a collaboration mode, which means a seamless work to achieve common goals.

The social capital will be the main driver, which means that people constitute the best asset of businesses. Professionals will spend more time in people-networking like activities than ever (i.e. on-line professional communities and social networks).

ECOSPACE (http://www.ip-ecospace.org/) is an integrated project of the Sixth Framework Programme of EU that will result a user-centric platform enabling the interoperability of innovative collaboration tools and services. It will empower users to easily build-up and deploy on-demand virtualised and knowledge rich collaborative environments that will free the user from information and communication overload and that will enable him to concentrate on creativity and productivity. The project pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment.

ECOSPACE provides the interoperability that enables users to connect their preferred tool to the global workplace similar to the ease by which today users can exchange e-mail between different organisations, using different products. No longer are users drowned by the complexity of multi-channel communication in the dynamic work environment. ECOSPACE hides the ICT complexity of the collaboration applications and empowers users to instantly plan and monitor cooperation activities in different teams and communities using a personalised, dynamic workplace, generated according to the context-specific needs.

The Panel Session on ECOSPACE includes a presentation by Ivan Popov and Martin Martinov and discussion.