If you are logged in the web-platform "Innovation and development of local self-government» http://mx.despro.org.ua:8081/ as a guest, you'll see dozens of forums, hundreds of topics added, thousands of posts made over the past months by 992 participants of the community of practice on local self-government, representing rural, district (rayon), municipal and regional (oblast) councils from all regions of Ukraine. This community of practice is a public platform created by the initiative of the State Fund for Local Self-Government in Ukraine with the support of the Swiss-Ukrainian Project "Decentralization Support in Ukraine" (DESPRO) in order to share experience, learn and disseminate best practices in local self-government, establish cooperation between local governments, and organize eLearning.

When you read message posted on the platform, you will see that the debate is professional, evidence-based, lots of discussions are based on personal experience, and you will feel the spirit of high trust between the participants, indicating the successful facilitation of large-scale communication: according to the participants, "we wish there were more such communication. Our communities, local governments and the state of Ukraine (in general) will only benefit from it."

Facilitators themselves have mentioned and appreciated the following success factors:

a)      real assessment of one’s own time and opportunities of the participants;

a)      usefulness of the training, which took place in Lviv on 19-21 November 2012, where many different and useful scenarios of activities and participation in the community were formulated;

a)      well matched platform tools;

a)      bringing together real like-minded persons - those who do want it and need it.

Among other suggestions, we should note the following:

The significant role of effective collaboration between experts, facilitators, participants and tutors has been distinguished, because this is not just a professional network! It is also one of the examples of successfully organized and conducted distance learning on a web-based platform within the training program "Management of project in local and regional development".

The e-course, which lasted for 2 months (from November 15, 2012 to January 15, 2013), was attended by 582 participants from all (!) regions of the country, in order to acquire new competence (skills) in project management to solve community problems. The objectives of the course included: systematizing knowledge on project development within the Ukrainian contest of projects and programs in local self-government; familiarizing participants with best practices and typical mistakes; providing better insight into the use of project management tools; providing the opportunity to acquire skills of comprehensive rationalization of the project; forming practical skills for evaluating the success and monitoring the project implementation; as well as initiating effective communication between local governments from various regions of Ukraine through the web portal.

Each registered course participant followed his or her individual educational trajectory, which included the task on defined priorities of the community and the territory development, the choice of methods for case analysis, problem formulation, the definition of innovative and systemic transformation, community involvement and preparation of the project plan/schedule or budget. Each of these tasks was a challenge faced by the participants, while performance of these tasks allowed moving on with the curriculum. You can see how worried tutors were when someone's educational trajectory ended off, because they understood that they were losing a participant of the learning process. However, a critical mass of participants has successfully completed the course (i.e., 209 participants got from 70 to 115 points), and today they applaud their tutors, experts, organizers who were constantly accompanying them and assisted them in achieving educational goals.

Besides, it was a very good idea to involve graduates of previous e-courses as facilitators of eight groups formed according to the professional interests of the participants.

We can say that all the actors of this training stage play have played their role professionally and at a high level; there was an exciting script and a thought-out stage direction, which allowed everyone to be able to get involved in knowledge construction and to acquire those competencies that will give a chance to develop the community and to implement reforms through projects and programs.

Currently on the platform, members the community of practice are working in the Idea Lab, where they do practical training in developing projects, which will be then submitted to the Ukrainian contest: