The workshops I have been involved in for European projects have all been about "partnership". A lead partner had gathered together a project team, spread across many European countries, and usually from different sectors or with different kinds of organisation. As any experienced project manager will tell you, these are by definition difficult projects to manage. Sometimes the project partners have worked together previously, but often there are new partners and sometimes the organisations have never worked together at all. It is unusual for the actual representatives of the partners to know each other and they often have not met face to face (or have only met briefly or irregularly). And once the contract is signed, they face the question how to actually collaborate together to get the job done. The workshops may use different kinds of methods (commonly used are LFA, Logical Framework Approach or GOPP, Goal-Oriented Project Planning, both underlying methodologies in Project Cycle Management) but whether the workshops are highly-structured, tightly-focused meetings with a central role for the facilitator like an LFA workshop or very loosely-structured, self-organising events like the Open Space meeting (OST) we participated in in Turin earlier this year, they all share one thing in common: the workshops focus on supporting and improving partnership through the development of a common understanding of and agreement about the goals and objectives of the project and consensus about the strategy for developing the project. In most (but not all) cases, the facilitator of such a workshop uses techniques known commonly as "Metaplan", a simple but highly effective way of focusing the attention of a group on specific topics, thus avoiding "drifting" in the discussion.