Warsaw Convention Bureau
Warsaw, with the Warsaw Convention Bureau (a division of the Warsaw Tourism Organization), is leading the charge in showcasing this vibrant and exciting city as a prime destination for professional meetings and events.
Why Warsaw?
Warsaw lies at the heart of Poland, and Poland at the heart of Europe. This is why this city is the perfect location not only for business and cultural events but also for political and scientific conferences. With modern architecture, friendly infrastructure, and creative inhabitants, Warsaw is a bustling business center that offers much more than meets the eye. Take a stroll along the beautiful Vistula coast or explore the fascinating Old Town to get a taste of what this city has to offer.
Activities
The Warsaw Convention Bureau is dedicated to promoting Warsaw as a top location for the MICE industry in the region and global meetings market. As a partner of the Poland Meetings Destination conference, they are committed to raising awareness of the economic impact of the industry. Additionally, they issue a regular “Warsaw Meetings Industry” report that provides detailed insights into the local market.
WCB Support
The bureau maintains a comprehensive calendar of future conferences and events in Warsaw and provides a range of promotional tools to its partners. With support from both Polish and international meeting planners, the Warsaw Convention Bureau is committed to providing the necessary resources and assistance to ensure a successful and memorable event.
Universitatis Varsoviensis
The Foundation for Students and Graduates of the University of Warsaw, “Universitatis Varsoviensis”, is a non-governmental organization operating for the benefit of the academic community since 1992. As one of the most dynamic academic organizations in Poland, its statutory objectives include meeting the scientific, educational, cultural, physical culture, and sports needs of students and graduates of universities, with a particular emphasis on those from the University of Warsaw.
The tasks and support for students
The Foundation provides organizational and financial support for the undertakings of other organizations operating at the University of Warsaw. Student organizations can use the Foundation’s office, telephones, computers, photocopiers, and other equipment. The Foundation provides legal assistance, lends accounts, and helps with financial settlements. In addition, the Foundation runs an Academic Legal Clinic that offers free legal assistance to students. The Foundation received a grant for the implementation of the task entitled “Academic Legal Clinic 2019/2020” as part of the Civic Initiatives Fund program in 2019.
Since 1997, in cooperation with the Office for Persons with Disabilities of the University of Warsaw, the Foundation has been running a program of financial assistance for students with disabilities. Grants are awarded for scientific research, and equipment is purchased for the rental of electronic portable equipment
The academic and cultural input
The Foundation manages the Proxima, Hybrydy, and Palladium Clubs, which conduct a wide range of cultural activities, including concerts, exhibitions, theatrical performances, and sports competitions. Events organized by the Foundation have become a permanent part of the Warsaw cultural scene, such as the Juvenalia Warszawskie, Blues Rock Jazz Warsaw Festival, and Warsaw Blues Night.
In 2018, the Foundation organized a series of concerts at the Palladium Theater entitled “Chopin was from the University of Warsaw!” to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the inauguration of classes at the University of Warsaw. The concert reminded everybody that the University of Warsaw is a special place in the biography of Fryderyk Chopin. The composer lived for ten years on the university campus in the post-rector building, currently the seat of the Institute of Art History and the Institute of Oriental Studies. He also graduated from the Main School of Music, part of the university’s Faculty of Science and Fine Arts.
The Foundation has been involved in the project entitled “The former astronomical and meteorological observatory named after Marshal Piłsudski on Mount Pop Iwan in Czarnohora, Ukraine – development of renovation and conservation documentation” aimed at rebuilding the Observatory. The implementation of the project contributes to adapting the Observatory to the needs of modern mountain tourism in the future and restoring some of its research and scientific functions. It creates the basis for creating a material base for dialogue between academic youth and Polish-Ukrainian cooperation in this area.
The Foundation constantly develops and expands its activities with new programs and initiatives.
Diversity management as innovation in journalism
The Managing Newsroom Diversity project (2021–2023) is centered on questions of voice, visibility and recognition as conditions and requirements of democratic participation. Project aims to explore news media organizations approaches to diversity alongside practical implementation of organisational change.
This project takes a communication-centered perspective of polyphony on diversity management in news media. Diversity management in this perspective becomes a dynamic set of procedures, structures and cultures that are designed in a way to allow for a range of individual opinions and societal discourses to get expressed and find resonance in newsroom settings. When the “polyphonic“ newsroom speaks (as news), many voices (i.e. individual and societal) speak through it.
Detailed description
Project is guided by three research questions:
- How is „diversity management as polyphony” motivated, managed and organized by people occupying different positions across national and regional, print, broadcast and digital born newsrooms in Sweden, the UK and Poland?
- RQ 2. How members (journalists), working in newsrooms where the objective of increasing newsrooms’ polyphony is explicit, experience their work and relationship with other members and non-members?
- RQ 3. How non-members (representatives of civil society, including minority media outlets), with whom newsrooms are working with the objective of increasing their polyphony, experience their relationship with these newsrooms?
Sweden, Poland and the UK represent very different cases when it comes to the tradition of diversity management. On the one hand, the UK, due to its colonial legacy, is considered a heterogeneous society, and has a long diversity management tradition. Sweden is in transition, due to immigration and intake of refugees, from homogeneous to a more heterogeneous society, and while it has relatively little experience with diversity management, it still represents, at large, an open and liberal society. On the other hand, Poland is largely a homogeneous society, making international headlines in recent years for refusing to respect the EU refugee quotas, sending thousands of women to the streets in defense of their reproductive rights and declaring „LGBT-free zones” in one-third of the country’s municipalities. Additionally, as a response to war in Ukraine, the project was enriched with the “Diversity management as innovation in journalism – Ukrainian task-force” (when we focus on diversity in the context of refuges, migration or media’s reaction on the war).
Managing Newsroom Diversity is a collaborative project between the project’s Research Team, interdisciplinary Advisory Board and Network of Partners, affiliated news industry research partners, media organizations and professionals devoted to the cause of advancing social inclusion in the media.
By bringing together a diverse team of experts, with distinct skills, expertise, and key networks, we strive both for successful fieldwork and critical implementation of the project, but also for conceptual and empirical refinement of the field of media and journalism studies.
Project is led by Dr. Greta Gober (PI) whose academic interests center on voice, visibility and unequal power relations, with regards to gender and other social and cultural categories operating in media organizations and industries. The research team also consists of co-investigators and research assistants: Co-Investigator, Associate Professor Anna Jupowicz-Ginalska (2022-2023) brings to the project a theoretical and practical approach to media management, media polarization, as well as helps with project management.
Project is funded by Norway Grants – Basic Research Programme POLS schema, operated by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) and is conducted at the Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies, University of Warsaw in Poland.