By Mr. V. G. Loscetales,

Secretary General, BIE

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am very happy to welcome everyone to this second Expo Online Seminar for Shanghai 2010.

We are one year from the opening of Shanghai 2010, and this meeting is a critical milestone. A virtual Expo that accompanies a physical World Expo is new in our history and, at the same time, is absolutely necessary.

In fact, in recent years, the BIE has insisted on the importance to conceive and to implement ways of further expanding the echo and the impact of the Expo by using new media.

We have stressed that information and communication technologies can be an ideal medium to enhance and communicate the richness of the content of World Expos and to connect with the global public for the duration of the event.

Expo Online for Shanghai 2010 materializes this vision. This is why it is such a milestone and turning-point in the history of Expos.

For these reasons, I am delighted that Shanghai 2010 organizers took up this major challenge of creating an online version of their World Expo. For this reason, I also recommend, strongly, all of you to take part in a project that will bring a lot of value to Shanghai 2010, to your presence and to future Expos.

Admittedly, this is a project of great complexity. However, the organizers are both committed and capable to master its different aspects: technical, organizational and promotional.

Those that like me and you are not information technology engieers might assume that the technical part is the hardest. In reality, having followed the project closely, I can confidently say that the hardest part is not setting up and running the technology infrastructure.

As usual with innovative projects, the biggest challenge is to reach a common understanding of the objectives, the needs and the impact of the project and to address all of the questions and uncertainties that participants have.

This second seminar is therefore a great opportunity to move forward, and more importantly, to reduce, if not eliminate, any concern regarding participation.

From the BIE perspective, I would like to stress that the importance of your participation in Expo Online, because it has a direct impact on three key factors that drive the success of the overall Expo:

1. The overall communication of Shanghai 2010.

2. The Communication and visibility of each one of the participants’ pavilions.

3. The impact on the visibility and on the innovative capacity of future Expos.

Let me briefly discuss these three points, which are fundamental to make a successful Expo today.

Expo Online supports the overall communication of Shanghai 2010 in a number of different ways. Expos do not lend themselves easily to be televised events. Unlike the Olympics, which are made up of punctual competitions that attract large TV audiences, the core of the experience of an Expo is quite different. Expos are events to be experienced through the presence as a visitor and even as a participant. The experience is the visit, the discovery, the continuous travel from one place to another, the learning.

Although there is no other event that is capable to attract, on the site, the number of visitors that an Expo can attract, the reality is that foreign visitors remain a very low percentage.

Expo Online can shift this trend and make the Expo accessible, all the time and from everywhere, to millions of virtual visitors from all over the world. Online visitors will be able to come back over and over again, even when the physical site is closed. Online visitors will be able to reach a better understanding of what an Expo is through a different and much more modern presentation. Even visitors that will come to the physical site, can use the virtual one to plan their future visits.

These are only some of the new features that Expo Online will make available to expand the experience of the Expo.

With the launch of the Expo Online site on May 1st there is an additional promotional channel that will greatly contribute to the promotion of the overall Expo.

Amongst the opportunities for promotion and outreach offered by Expo Online, participants can improve their global visibility and presence.

This leads me to the second factor of success, namely the communication and the visibility of participants. Today, the BIE and Expo organizers ask participants to achieve a double objective: to have an attractive pavilion and to present the theme in a rich and deep fashion. We have seen in past Expos that often the content is sacrificed to the esthetic of the pavilion or vice versa.

Without reducing this requirement from physical pavilions, the virtual pavilions in Expo Online provide a way to further develop the theme. This can obviously take many forms that include the presentation of national projects, of actors and of initiatives that would not otherwise find a space in the physical pavilion.

The virtual pavilion is also a way, for each participant, to achieve two other objectives:

• The first is to support the communication of the overall Expo in their own country. Nationals not only will go and visit the online pavilion organized under their flag, but will have an opportunity to navigate through all the other pavilions. Therefore, the online presence of one participant will help support and promote the participation of others.
• The second is to promote and support other aspects of your country (businesses, organizations, cultural and social initiatives) that could otherwise not be showed or explained in the physical pavilion for reasons of space or costs.

Last but not least, Expo Online can have a significant impact on the promotion and innovative capacity of future Expos. As participants and organizers, we all see the value of Expos as unique platforms for global public communication and public diplomacy. We also share a responsibility to grow and expand the educational and innovative value of Expos for the benefit of future Expos, and, more importantly, of the millions of visitors we will welcome. I am firmly convinced that Expo Online is a tool that supports us in this objectives; its potentials are still unexplored and further opportunities will open up as we all get involved in it.

Having shared some of the objectives, the needs and the impacts of Expo Online, I would like to share a few thoughts on the type of participation.

Following the model of the physical Expo, the organizers are providing different modes of online participation. The options range from the standard pavilion to the experiencing pavilion. What is the difference?

Although the standard pavilion will be enough to ensure an online presence, it will not provide the flexibility that is inherent in the online medium. Your online presence is important, and even necessary. However, in the spirit of excellence and innovation promoted by Expos, I would like to encourage you to consider to participate with an experience pavilion. This will allow you to show the depth and the variety of your country and of the theme, thus offering greater opportunities for visibility across the world.

Participating with an experiencing pavilion also represents an opportunity to involve innovators at home. The technology savvy enterprises are the younger innovators at home; they are those generations that we need to involve and engage in Expos to maintain their future relevance and to continue to speak and to excite each generation. For these reasons, I urge you to envision and conceive your online pavilion as an extension and an expansion of the physical one.

There are certainly many degrees of innovation that you can introduce in the online pavilions, and the possibilities can be discussed directly with the organizers who have the skills and personnel to support you in this project.

In fact, having recently come back from an intense visit to Shanghai where the BIE has met with all of the Expo departments, I can ensure you that the organizers have invested significant resources in this project, especially technical and human. Their objective is to guarantee that the technology will not represent an obstacle for the participants. The technology is a means to an end, and the end is to have a rich and innovative presence in Shanghai 2010 that includes both the physical dimension and the virtual dimension.

Through the prizes that are awarded to pavilions for architecture, theme development, etc., the BIE aims at encouraging original and high quality presentations. In the same spirit, we are considering to introduce a prize for online pavilions, therefore stressing the fact that our organization considers the Online Expo a full dimension of the overall Expo.

I strongly encourage all of you to imagine your own opportunities and, based on that, engage with the organizers to set in motion the process that will materialize your online presence.

The full support that the BIE is providing to this Expo Online project also translates in the commitment of our organization to facilitate this contact and this engagement.

With this, I wish you all a good day of work and I look forward to the presentations and the exchanges that will take place today and that will open the path to yet another novel dimension of World Expos.

Congratulations and thank you very much.