The IT committee of BEST organizes three to four meetings every year which take place all over Europe, explains co-organizer Nick van der Veeken. Last week Eindhoven functioned as host city for the meeting. Prior to this the members had had three months to work on a specific problem of the BEST website. During the meeting in Eindhoven the preliminary results were presented.
The digital facilities of BEST Internationaal consist of three components: a business site, with which the members themselves are hardly involved, a mailing list, and intraweb, where members can register for various courses. One of the subjects under scrutiny last week was the chat function. Also, members tried to find a way to allow users to log in on the various systems with one and the same login name.

Catalyst
“The meeting is the first opportunity for a test of the solutions, whereupon the other members can give feedback straight away. This works better than mailing reactions, whilst being more stimulating as well. In a way, then, such a meeting works like a catalyst”, says Van der Veeken.
BEST member Maja Siljanoska from Macedonia concurs: “We’re doing a lot of work here: meetings like this are very efficient. I’m looking forward to finishing the feature I’ve been working on.”
During the meetings and courses of BEST there is also time for cultural exchange. This usually involves sampling each other’s culinary specialties during an ‘international evening’. In Eindhoven such an international evening had been planned in de Bunker, but unfortunately the culinary offer remained limited to some ready-made snacks. Van der Veeken: “I regret to say that the gas in our room was laid on only two days ago; it meant that we could not guarantee our members that they would be able to cook during the night in question.”/.