eSangathan is a FP6 EU-funded project from the IST programme of European Union. It is a two-year project dedicated to the inclusion of the ageing workforce in the information society. The eSangathan project has officially started on October 1, 2006. The work is concentrated on a specific segment of the population: the ageing knowledge workers.

The eSangathan project has the ambition to find out if the good practices learned in India with respect to the ageing knowledge worker combined with the most advanced usages of collaborative working tools in Europe could result in new and better perspectives for the ageing workforce. eSangathan experiments how they could benefit from using collaborative tools.

A pilot is running in India in one of the major corporations in order to test how the implementation of a collaborative working environment could facilitate and turn more efficient the work and the life of the expert retirees. Mahindra & Mahindra Corporation, as a member of the consortium, is hosting and managing this pilot with the technical support of Tech Mahindra.

Tech Mahindra, specialist in IT Solutions to the Telecom Industry, created a state-of-art collaboration solution for eSangathan Indian Pilot. It comprises of both real-time and non-real time collaboration including Wikis, Blogs, Instant Messaging, Application Sharing, Document sharing, workflows for a widely distributed demography of retiree-experts in India.

Another pilot is running in Öresund region in Sweden and Denmark. Keeping in mind the Indian social model and using European technological capabilities should enable more European 50+ knowledge workers to join again the labour market.

Folkuniversitetet in Sweden, one of the partners of the project, in co-operation with the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark, another partner of the project, is running this group of people who will elaborate on areas of interest within nodes of growth in the region with collaborative working environments as working tool.

The methodological approaches used to define, segment and implement the pilots come from CBS. The whole project is conceived as a virtual community thanks to the experience and support from Netcipia.

The scientific experience of this specific segment of population lies with AgeProof, the Dutch partner of the consortium.

Distance Expert, a French consulting firm, is proud to co-ordinate such a team working collaboratively with the most advanced technological tools on one of the European key societal issues.

Each partner will set up a national interest group in order to gather the most advanced views on this topic and to syndicate the major actors and develop the best possible social, economical and political recommendations.