One of the main motives for creating the network is the very good results from the TEMPUS S_JEP- 11392 "Restructuring Degree Courses in Computing", finished in 1999, that united for three years the five Bulgarian departments of Computing and five similar departments in England, Germany, Italy and Greece. The Coordinator of this Project was the Department of Computing at the University of Rousse. The organization of the work within this project and mainly the results of the consortium's work were the main reason for electing the project as a flagship. The network, created within this project will be used as a model when establishing the new thematic network.

Another major motive comes from the following. According to forecasts by many specialists the 21st century will be an Information Technology Century. It is expected that new Information and Communication Technologies will enter absolutely every area of human activity - material as well as mental, which will cause a third industrial revolution. This will lead to the establishment of a new quality of society, which is called the Information Society. This society will be based on a continually expanding network of computers with continually improving performance whose infrastructure is the INTERNET. The stability of this platform and of this society will depend mainly on the people who are assigned by the society, the tasks of developing, producing and maintaining its separate components, i.e. on the quality of trained computer specialists. Following this logic we inevitably come to the universities and more particularly to the departments that teach Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science and Engineering (Computing). Is it possible for the individual departments, using only their own resources and facilities and bearing in mind the current boom in the field of the Information Technologies, to ensure the necessary quality of the final product of their activity? Obviously this would be possible only through the close cooperation of a widely representative commonwealth of Computing and Information Technologies Departments in Europe. Therefore, in order to meet the requirements of the Information XXI Century, these departments should integrate their efforts from the very beginning of this century linking in a Thematic Network - EUROPEAN COMPUTING EDUCATION and TRAINING (TN ECET), an opportunity given by the SOCRATES-ERASMUS programme. Applying the Information Technologies they must join their efforts in creating a VIRTUAL EUROPEAN DEPARTMENT of COMPUTING (VEDoC), which should become a powerful producer of specialists capable of developing the latter technologies according to the constantly rising needs of the Information Society of Europe as a whole.

ECET will be created on a goodwill principle and will be open to all departments, associations, societies and companies from the computer branch willing to join in. It is based on an Academic Society established as a result of the above-mentioned project work. Its main objective is to combine the efforts of lecturers in Computing to improve and maintain the quality of teaching and research at a level determined by European and world standards.