Digital Agenda Funding

Project Status: Completed

Project Leader: Colm Mc Colgan

EU Programme: INTERREG II C Community Initiative concerning Tran

Project Budget: €808,521

Start Date: Sep, 1999

Finish Date: Feb, 2001

The aim of the project is to:

Show how regions and regional actors can work together, in the Digital Age, in a manner that breaks the strangle-hold of location and distance and the paradigm of centre-periphery. It also helps to achieve a more balanced model of development, based on new kinds of inter-regional solidarity and interdependence and a better distribution of activities, according to optimal specialisation and complementarity between regions.

Specific objectives are to:

To develop an operational model for policy-makers and planners within regions and at the level of the European Spatial Development Perspective which promotes a more balanced and appropriate form of development proper to the Digital Age. This will be based on regional specialisation, inter-regional interdependence and solidarity between knowledge-exchanging and learning regions.
To identify in particular the possibilities and objective limits of ICTs in allowing regions to transcend the constraints of location and space and to develop a "working method" for co-operation through multiple interregional relations in a manner that emulates a "Single Virtual Region" and allows for a variable, more balanced and flexible model of development across European regions.

Donegal, Ireland
ERNACT Network(Lead Partner)

Derry & Strabane, United Kingdom
Derry City & Strabane District Council(Partner)

Donegal, Ireland
Donegal County Council(Partner)

Galway, Ireland
Galway County Council(Partner)

Paris, France
Ile-de-France(Partner)

Wirral, United Kingdom
Metropolitan Borough of Wirral(Partner)

The "Virtual Region" project is designed to test how and in what areas European regions could co-operate as a single "virtual region" irrespective of their geographical location in order to optimise their development potential in the new information-based digital era and, collectively, promote a more balanced development model, based on regional specialisation and close inter-regional learning.