The Talks
Since its creation, Atrium.brussels, which became hub.brussels in January 2018, has generated an immeasurable amount of data, information and knowledge. It therefore became essential to share this knowledge, firm in the Socratic belief that, “knowledge is the only thing that grows when shared”.
Over two years, hub.brussels has decided to focus on 4 topics: pop-up stores, markets, sites of building work and traders associations. For each topic, the Agency determined the key stakeholders and gathered their opinion on the problems they face, their needs and their hopes, through surveys and open forums. The team in charge of the project has christened this upstream research #LISTEN.
Based on this information, the team drafted a guide for each subject, summarising the situation and offering the target audiences advice on the topic in question.
A sharing session (#Tell) took place five to six months later, in order to tackle each of the themes. The Agency took this opportunity to exchange knowledge with the relevant stakeholders.
The talks enable the Agency to communicate and to situate itself with regards to a wealth of knowledge, know-how and expertise that had previously remained in the hands of a few insiders.
The initiative has generally been very well received by participants, having forged networks and garnered a large and faithful audience, including prospective business owners, municipal authorities and other public bodies, Traders Associations, business owners not belonging to associations, members of public bodies (Unizo, AMCV etc.), from Brussels and elsewhere.
In advance of each session, the Agency prints 250 surveys in French and 150 in Dutch, and a copy of each is posted online. The target audience also engage with the content through several participative workshops, before and after the Talk.
‘This experience creates and tests a series of methodologies in terms of the internal functioning of the Agency. Our experiences of working on these four initial themes enables us to put forward recommendations for potential future sessions. Especially since Agency users are asking for more initiatives of this kind. '
