Good morning, Ladies and gentlemen from all over the World!

Welcome to Vienna, Austria for the congress sessions of the 45. Intersteno Congress.

My name is Wolfgang Behm. I am the Editor of the Official Report in the German Parliament, in short, a professional reporter. Today and tomorrow morning I like to accompany you through the sessions of this congress. Among the competitions and the organizational part, these sessions are one of the main columns of the Intersteno Congress. I am convinced to present you a very attractive program of speeches, presentations, and demonstrations, which will bring you a lot of new information and give you incentives to perform your professional work in reporting and teaching more effective. Let’s talk about all these things in the discussions following the speeches.

The congress sessions are scheduled in four parts:

• Past and Future,
• Teachers and E-Teaching
• The Reporting Activity, and
• International Partners.

The first session, “Past and Future”, concentrates on the historical development of Intersteno on one side and future developments especially in reporting technologies on the other side. While we discussed in Rome, two years ago, the integration of writing and multimedia, today we also want to put non-writing technologies for reporting more in the focus.

In the second session we’ll turn to “Teaching and E-Teaching.” The second part of this topic already indicates, that the influences of new information technologies and multimedia become more and more important also in this field. Teaching must change and has got the chance to change. In a modern and globalized world knowledge needs to be transported to everyone and everywhere. Internet and other new media make it possible. There is the need for new teaching approaches as well as new and more ergonomic tools to perform the tasks.

The main issue of the third session, starting late this afternoon, is “The Reporting Activity”, concerning the profession a lot of us come from. We’ll be introduced to different reporting systems, the state of the reporting profession in the view of NRCA, new developments in Stenotype, aspects of the parliamentary reporting work, and a special question of handling shorthand.

In the last, the fourth part of the congress sessions “International Partners” from Asia, South America, and Africa will present their organizations and their work.

Before Mr. Cees van Beurden will get the floor to present the activities of the in Rome 2003 new created Intersteno Scientific Committee I would like to give some technical information:

Simultaneous translation to English and German is available in this hall. Please ask at the entrance for the necessary devices, translations will be on channel 5. Please do exclusively use these languages, if you like to contribute to the discussion.

The schedule of the congress sessions is very condensed. Therefore we need to keep discipline. May I ask all speakers not to exceed the time limit they got.

For recreation we’ll have some coffee breaks, the first at 11.15 a.m., and the lunch break at 1 p.m.

And now Cees van Beurden, Intersteno Scientific Committee.