The first Open Floor Debate, held at ELSO 2000 in Geneva, was a rather ‘free-style’ event in which the new committee presented itself to ELSO members and spelled out some of the issues that it thought to tackle in the coming years. A full account of this session by Nancy Lane (Talking of jobs …) is available in The ELSO Gazette.

The outcome of this first session was a decision to lobby the European Commission (EC), during the planning stage for Framework Programme 6, to create funding for junior independent group leaders, an idea that was also being lobbied by the Max Planck Society and others. In this, its first experience of lobbying, the CDC drafted a letter to members of the European Parliament (MEPs), translated it into all the major languages of the European Union member-states and asked ELSO members to send the letter to their national MEPs. The result was the inclusion of the Excellent Teams Award in the Marie Curie actions of FP6.