There may be a large sea between the counties of Västmanland (Swe) and Angus (UK) but they have a lot in common. Both counties are dominated by rural areas and  close to cities like Västerås and Dundee. Actors on both sides of the North Sea realized this and decided that they should collaborate and learn from each other. And that they should do this through Dreamler.

The two counties have now started cooperating with the purpose of exchanging knowledge, experience and ideas with each other in order to become better at marketing tourist attractions and distributing and processing local food; locally, nationally and internationally. This will be achieved through real and concrete joint projects, planned and implemented in Dreamler. To kick off the collaboration, they’ll micro export locally produced food between the counties to be sold at farmers’ markets.

Last week Jörgen Gustafsson from Västmanland County, who’s idea it was to Dreamler in the project, asked the people over at Angus to download and try Dreamler. Their reaction was positive, as Richard Stiff, the Project Manager at Angus put it: “I’ve never seen a tool that’s as easy as this one. We should definitely try this one out in the project.” And so, it was decided that Dreamler will be used for this collaborative project. That’s awesome news for us, as it means that all of the time spent on developing Dreamler is, now, showing great results!

Starting now, 15 people from the counties will be using Dreamler to implement micro export projects. The participants will be ranging from ice cream producers to suppliers of smoked fish. They’re starting small, just to initiate the network, and include more and more producers in due time. I asked Jörgen why they want to use Dreamler: “I’ve never met the people from Angus in person so our relationship is still quite fresh. It’s going to be really interesting to use Dreamler as our workspace for building our relationship and to create a network of collaborating food producers that learns from each other. I hope that the project maps and templates in Dreamler will help the producers to share knowledge so we can become much better at all of this.”  

Dreamler should be a perfect tool for the task, especially since the project participants don’t know each other yet. We’ve developed a formal visual language for people to describe any project. Dreamler is therefore a facilitator for communicating around projects. Also, because the project has a focus on learning from each other, it’s going to be really interesting to see how the project templates can come in handy.