Before the Library. Before the Consortium. Our very first Annual Event, with community joining across five continents. We met in Paris.
In June 2018, the very first FLIP event brought together 55 participants from 17 countries. It was a simple beginning, built on a shared instinct: that national assessment systems, each facing the same transition to digital, had far more to gain from talking to each other than from working alone.
Over two days, colleagues from France, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal and Brazil and a few other countries shared how their institutions were approaching digital assessment. They looked together at open standards and open-source tools. And in a series of roadmap and community-building sessions, they began sketching something that did not yet have a shape: how a partnership like this might be governed, how it might work, how the effort might be shared.
Nobody in that room knew exactly what it would become. But the appetite was unmistakable. Three-quarters of participants said they were already involved, or wanted to play an active role in what came next.
That was the ambition of the community. From those two days in Paris grew the FLIP+ Association, the FLIP+ Library, and a community that now spans institutions across the world: still built on the same belief that brought those first 55 people together.
We grow better together. It started in Paris. It continues today.
