The 1st X-Melina workshop took place in Athens from the 23rd to the 26th of July 2003, at Novotel Athens Hotel.

The majority of the 18 people who attended the workshop (15 participants and 3 observers) were from Greece and there were also participants from Italy, Rumania, Austria and France.

The Workshop was made up of presentations by experts in the mornings and a business simulation project in the afternoon. The morning presentations introduced aspects of cross-media content production by acclaimed professionals in the field of cross media and new technologies. The issues introduced included: "Project Management in Cross media production", "Project Finance", "Selling and Distributing A Production in Europe", "Dramatic content Engineering" and Case-studies.

The afternoon workshops were a surprise for some of the participants, who were unfamiliar with project-based learning through simulation. The two groups were called upon to complete a task drawing upon their own expertise in management and consulting with the experts on an "actual" case which involved them directly. The task is identical to the one they will be facing once their company or organization eventually decide upon reorganizing for a Cross-Media business environment. It was expected that the complexity of the task would overwhelm initially people who were just introduced to the concept of Cross-Media content production. But it is precisely this complexity they will have to deal with once they return to their company or organization. They were not expected to produce actual solutions (although some of the ideas presented were original and promising). But they were expected to experience this sense of disorientation and come out at the end with the knowledge that there can be a systematic way of introducing change and that there are experts who can help, provided you know whom to seek and where to find him or her.

Role-play featured extensively involving experts as well as participants.

The bonus in the afternoon session was that participants had a chance to network with possible future colleagues and show them what they are good at. For some, this represented a good investment as word-of-mouth is perhaps the dominant way of recruiting partners or employees in the audiovisual area.

Participants commented positively on the material provided to them during the workshop, the workshop content, the tutors, their lectures and how approachable they were, and also the hotel that was chosen to host the whole workshop. One participant mentioned: "One of the pleasant surprises of the workshop was the fact that everything was so well organized and the kindness of the organizers". Another said that: "Two things you should never change are the diversity of the presentations and the delightful atmosphere of all the seminars".

The welcoming reception, held on the 23rd of July, was another event that really attracted positive comments. Both the impressive roof garden of the hotel and the spectacular view of the Acropolis made the night very special and unforgettable.

The Athens workshop has been indeed a good start for the X-Melina Training Programme. On behalf of the organizers, we would like to thank all the partners, the tutors, the participants and generally the people who helped this very first workshop be a success, upon the strengths and weaknesses of which the future X-Melina workshops will be based, so as to achieve top quality of the whole training programme.