May 14 was a record day as for attendance statistics of the platform "Community of Practice: Innovation in Local Government» http://mx.despro.org.ua :8081 - 8,566 logs a day. That very day a planned topic "Project Planning (Fundamentals of Project Management)" conducted within the course "Managing the projects on local and regional development" was launched. It is distant (eLearning) training for more than 800 participants from all over Ukraine. The number of registered participants and their activity demonstrated that local self-government in Ukraine is ready to use possibilities of modern communication and training technologies to discuss and solve actual problems of local self-governance.

 

During the first training weeks, the trainees got acquainted with following issues:

 

·        Reforms and local self-governance priorities

·        Community challenges: How to identify them? Who is to solve to solve them?

·        Methodology of conducting socio-economic analyses by problematic aspects the project is aimed at (SWOT, GAP, etc.)

·        Correspondence of projects goals and objectives (under development) to local strategy on administrative and territorial unit development

·        Stakeholders – different visions of same problems

·        Criteria of project’s innovation

·        Systematic proposed transformations

·        Ensuring legislative ground to proposed transformations

 

Besides learning the training programme, the trainees have the possibility to communicate with experts on local self-governance and with peers discussing the issues related to administrative reform, the role of rayon community resource centers, attracting the citizens’ finances to projects’ implementation on the sites, energy and resource saving, etc.

 

Swiss-Ukrainian Project “Decentralization Support in Ukraine” (DESPRO), State Foundation for local self-governance and National Academy of Public Administration cooperate to ensure distant training “Managing the projects on local and regional development” and establish the community of practice “Innovations in local self-government”.

 

Distant training is aimed at acquiring by its participants the new competences on project management for solving community problems as well as for forming the community of practice “Innovations in local self-governance”. The trainees will have an opportunity: to systematize the knowledge on projects development within All-Ukrainian call for proposals for projects and programs on local self-governance development; get acquainted with best practices and typical mistakes while project developing and implementing; to obtain knowledge on different project managements tools.

 

This distant training will also launch regular communication among local self-governing bodies from different regions of Ukraine due to Inter-regional information and training network “Effective State” www.derzhava.in.ua for ensuring systematic processes related to creation, analyses, storage and distribution of informational resources and knowledge within local self-governance sector.