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This working group report has been a mixture of privilege and pain: privilege to work with such a committed, engaged and high-quality group of colleagues from diverse arenas, not all of whom I knew beforehand,. I want to thank them all for their collegial commitment, well beyond their formal contractual obligations. However I reserve my most especial thanks for our rapporteur, Ulrike Felt, who has not only borne her full share of the writing and rewriting of several drafts, starting in summer 2006, but has also managed always to compensate for my rather indulgent academic chairing of our group’s intense, mostly constructive but often difficult meetings, when I should have given pragmatism more influence. She always pulled us back on track, from the beginning right to the very end, and I am forever grateful to her for that.

We convened for the first time in July 2005, and altogether met five times for about two days each at roughly four-monthly intervals. Initially we were assisted by Nicole Dewandre, who encouraged us very much to address the issue in a rather broad manner. She was replaced in September 2006 by Rene von Schomberg. On behalf of the group I thank both for helping us at the different stages of this work. Another Commission staff-member, Silvio Funtowicz, took part as an academically recognized expert in the field of our report, and we are also grateful to him not only for his own research and policy insights, but for sharing with us his long-standing experience of Commission preoccupations. I would also like to thank Michael Rogers giving us his response to an earlier draft in the light of his experiences as a senior European policy …