How we documented the GAIA Congress 2017 using Twitter

I was involved in yet another Conference (4th GAIA Panhellenic Congress 2017) in terms of organizing the use of social media and I believe that it was a successful one in this sense.

To make a long story short, the challenging fact was that the audience of the Conference was highly heterogeneous, ranging from farmers and representatives of agricultural cooperatives to agricultural advisors, SMEs, various actors of the agrifood chain, members of EU projects related to agriculture and policy makers, to name a few. This heterogeneity reflected the differences in using and making use of social media during the Conference. It was obvious that we needed to prepare things in a way that would allow us to provide a feed of the Conference's outcomes adapted to the needs of different audiences with different needs and characteristics. But we were up to the challenge :-)

Preparation

First we had to select the most appropriate channel for sharing the news; Twitter was the winner, thanks to its nature which favors sharing short news items constantly, including media (e.g. photos, videos and even slides). On top of that, Twitter has a proven successful history of being used for the same purpose in numerous Conferences. On the other hand, using other media like Facebook (or even worse LinkedIn) for such purpose, creates an overload of information on channels that are used more 

After selecting the medium, we spent time on organizing our resources: There were different organizations behind the Conference, each one with its own audience and each one had to share the outcomes of the Conference instantly, using the appropriate language. So we had the Twitter accounts of GAIA Epiheirein, GAIA's EU Office located in Brussels (@GAIA Epicherein EU), NEUROPUBLIC, along with our personal Twitter accounts. We also had people managing these accounts so that we could tweet individually.

We started with the definition of the hashtag for the Conference (#GAIACongress17), which we arranged to be displayed on the video wall of the conference even before it started, so that participants would know which hashtag to use when tweeting.

Then, we built a list of the Twitter account of the speakers and lists of hashtags which were of relevance to the Congress, so that we would maximize the impact of our tweets. This alone takes a lot of time and effort, since we need to be accurate - I still remember seeing tweets mentioning a totally different person than the one intended or a hashtag that is frequently used in other contexts (e.g. gaming).

Last but not least, we split the responsibilities among the different Twitter accounts; for example, sessions of interest only to Greek farmers would mostly be covered by the GAIA Epicherein account in Greek, sessions of interest (and with foreign speakers) to EU farmers would mostly be covered by the GAIA Brussels account in English while sessions and presentations/talks related to smart farming and technology in general would be covered by the NEUROPUBLIC account (also in English).

Implementation

Despite the fact that we had carefully organized things, it was obvious that one should be able to cover for the others; in several cases, we had our main Twitter managers running up and down for setting things up, moderating panels of the Conference and making last minute arrangements with panelists and participants. In this sense, we succeeded in using different accounts so that we would not leave any part of the Conference unreferenced.

Future #CAP: tackling the challenges of competitiveness, climate change & environment via a well targeted policy.

Supporting farmers or agricultural land?

For Member States or for farmers? @TassosHaniotis @Gaia_Brussels #GaiaCongress17 pic.twitter.com/LlWHsu6p5M

— Farm Europe (@FarmEurope) November 10, 2017

The use (and display) of the Conference's hashtag allowed others to make use of it and be involved in the conversation, which was one of the most important aspects. We kept mentioning participants and their organizations in our tweets, so that they would also be engaged (and they did). We also mentioned non-participating organizations when tweeting something of interest to them, so that they would also keep an eye on the updates.

“Η εφαρμογή των νέων τεχνολογιών στην καθημερινότητα του αγρότη αποτελεί προτεραιότητα τoυ #MinDigitalGr”
Ομιλία του Υπουργού ΨΗΠΤΕ στο #GaiaCongress17 pic.twitter.com/ySIDJLwlnN

— MinDigitalGr (@MinDigitalGr) November 10, 2017

This resulted in various Twitter accounts being involved in the Conference's discussions which allowed us to spread the progress and outcomes of the Conference at a wider audience - much wider than the one consisting of only the participants. Apart from that, the intensive use of Twitter allowed us to create a simple documentation of the event for future reference, including quotes, images and other media.

Exploring collaboration opportunities among Mediterranean countries: The WE MED Conference

The WE MED Conference took place in Athens, Greece on December 16th, 2016. It was an event of the ENI CBC Med programme, aiming at bringing together various types of stakeholders interested in joining forces towards addressing common issues in the Mediterranean countries. The programme itself provides both the framework and the funding needed for materializing collaboration among Med countries.

I was informed about the event a month ago; still, the registration was already closed due to high participation. My persistence along with kind responses from the organizing team granted me a place in the waiting list and then I was informed that I would be among the participants. And I was glad I would.

The event was organized in three themed sessions:

1. Get Inspired: Consisted of successful use cases of collaboration among Mediterranean countries (presenting projects funded by the programme) as well as the views of key stakeholders. I found this session really appealing as it provided the human face of the collaboration; instead of having these typical slides including lists of deliverables of projects, there were real people (like farmers, researchers and entrepreneurs, to name a few) that explained how their lives were positively affected by the aforementioned collaborations.
2. Learn: It consisted of a number of presentations about the ENI CBC Med programme, covering different aspects. The slides provided the necessary background to participants in order to understand the concept and opportunities that may be available for funding collaborations of innovative groups and ideas. Lots of useful information on the eligibility of countries and thematic areas, restrictions and guidelines.
3. Connect: A purely networking session, allowing participants with common expectations to get in touch, exchange ideas and find common ground to work on projects that would address common challenges. The main Conference room was split into numerous smaller places with card boards used as whiteboards for brainstorming, matching profiles of participants with needs of organizations and discussing on issues of common interest.

Warm stories of #Entrepreneurship, #innovation & #collaboration presented at the 1st session of the #WEMED Conference pic.twitter.com/KDbk3YjBuZ

— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) December 16, 2016

The event provided me with the opportunity to get to know and talk to people from various countries, working on different topics and looking for partners in order to address common challenges. As I was participating on behalf of NEUROPUBLIC, I focused on sharing information about our smart farming services and see how they could meet the needs of potential stakeholders from other Med countries; the possibility of applying our approach in different contexts sounded appealing and I managed to identify at least a couple of cases which we could follow up after the Conference. Apart from that, I was well-informed about the possibilities provided by the programme in turning such collaborations into projects.

Interested in #SmartFarming in #Mediterranean countries? Check out our proposal at the #WEMED Conference Cooperation wall! pic.twitter.com/hGQt40Zvid

— NEUROPUBLIC (@Neuropublic) December 16, 2016

From an organizational perspective, I was happy to see that the organizers had already defined a Twitter hashtag (#WEMED) so that all tweets would be grouped and easily retrievable. During the Conference I was tweeting using both my personal Twitter account and the NEUROPUBLIC one, trying to cover different aspects of the event and boost the dissemination of its updates. There was also a Cooperation Wall; a huge whiteboard where participants could stick post-it notes with their ideas and contact details. I surely made use of that functionality as well and found the idea brilliant.

The Conference organizers had also engaged Alex Hughes from Drawnalism, who always does a great work in depicting ongoing discussions in the form of cartoons - a great visualization mean if you ask me! On top of that, everything was well-organized; something that must have been a challenge considering the relatively high number of participants.

Can't help but love such drawings; they give a different perspective to a Conference like #WEMED! https://t.co/pNSNxr1HL0

— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) December 16, 2016

If you are interested in learning more about the outcomes of the WE MED Conference, you can go through the summary provided by the programme team - you can also watch some of the Conference's video recordings via the ENI CBC Med Programme YouTube channel.

I can only thank the organizers of the event, not only for the kind invitation but also for hosting a successful meeting, engaging so many different stakeholders and doing their best in assisting them through networking and identifying funding opportunities for their innovative ideas.

Discussing about open data during MEDHackathon 2016

MEDHackathon 2016 took place in Patras, Greece, between 13-15/7/2016 - it was organized by various organizations including ERFC and SDI4Apps and hosted by the University of Patras in the lovely Conference Cultural Centre. MEDHackathon consisted of two main parts:

1. A Conference on the first day, followed by
2. A hackathon on the next two days - open data in different contexts and types. 

Both events were international, attracting participants from Greece, Latvia, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Norway etc.

Could you be such an #innovative #farmer? Texting cows, #fleets & #drones to #manage your #farm @vprot @Neuropublic pic.twitter.com/kPZg8QYtlB

— Irene Matzakou (@IreneMatz) July 13, 2016

I had the pleasure to attend the first two days of the event and in fact to make a presentation on how NEUROPUBLIC makes use of open data in its smart farming services. It has been a long time since I last participated in a Conference and a bit longer since I last made a presentation.The presentation provided some information on the status of open data in the agricultural sector, provided examples of open data in terms of types and formats and then showed examples of commercial uses of open data in commercial applications. The presentation concluded with the description of NEUROPUBLIC's GAIA Sense network consisting of a number of telemetric stations (GAIATrons) that are developed in-house and explained how the sensor data of these stations are combined with open earth observation data from the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency (ESA) to provide meaningful services to farmers.

Doing business with Open Data in agriculture by Vassilis Protonotarios

The Conference included presentations from the Greek public sector (describing the progress and status of opening up governmental data) as well as from private sector (focusing on how they make use of these data). It has been a great experience and allowed me to get to know some really interesting people like Nikolas Petropoulos from ERFC (organizers and hosts of the event), Visiting Prof. Fotis Nanopoulos (ex General Director of EUROSTAT and a person full of interesting stories to share), Irene Matzakou (Intrasoft International, really focused on projects and also active on social media like me!), Ery Zisi from the Greek Ministry of Agriculture (the person responsible for the ministry's open data!), Kalliope Aggelakopoulou (legal advisor and active contributor to the official Greek Open Data portal) and many-many more.



At the same time I had the pleasure to meet some old friends and colleagues like Karel Charvat (he was among the organizers of this event), Pavlos Georgiadis (We Deliver Taste / CAPSELLA), Prof. Vassilis Makios (Corallia) and others.

During the 2nd day of the event (which was also the first day of the Hackathon), I had to pass the floor to my colleague Thanasis Manos as I had to leave (and get back to the office) after I made a presentation of NEUROPUBLIC's challenge.

Lots of interesting ideas materialized using #OpenData in #MEDHackathon - congrats to everyone working on them! https://t.co/vHbQcjQRAO

— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) July 15, 2016

If you want to get an overview of what happened during MEDHackathon 2016, you can check out the Twitter hashtag #MEDHackathon for short comments and lots of photos from the event. The event was also broadcasted live through the University of Patras's Web TV.

Overall it was a nice experience, which combined the presentation of our work (the GAIASense network), setting up a challenge for the hackathon based on GAIATron sensor data and some useful networking among the participants.

International Conference "Agriculture for Life, Life for Agriculture"

The International Conference "Agriculture for Life, Life for Agriculture" was organized by  the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest (USAMVB) between June 5 - 7, 2014 in Bucharest, Romania, at the USAMVB premises. By conveniently collocating the Herbal.Mednet 4th project meeting with the Conference, the Herbal.Mednet project partners were allowed to participate in the second day of the Conference and actively contribute to it by delivering a number of presentations.

The Conference covered a wide variety of topics and consisted of the following 7 sessions

1. Agronomy
2. Horticulture
3. Animal Science
4. Veterinary Medicine
5. Land Reclamation, Earth Observation & Surveying, Environmental Engineering
6. Biotechnology
7. Management and Engineering in Rural Areas

In addition, it included a number of keynote speeches from various speakers. You may find the full program of the Conference here.

The 2nd day of the Conference, which we attended and participated in, was well-organized and attended by about 100 people, including university staff, students as well as participants from other organizations and initatives. Dr. Salvador Sanchez was in the panel of the specific session of the Conference and he also presented the case of the Open Discovery Space (ODS) project. His presentation was followed by the one by Prof. Vicente Castell-Zeising from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, on the cultivation of organic medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) in Spain. Then, Marta di Pierro from AIAB, the new Herbal.Mednet project partner, presented the marketing aspect of the MAPs in Italy using a Prezi-based presentation, which came out really interesting. She has a really interesting story to share about her participation in the Conference, the preparation of her slides and how she managed to transfer the slides from her iPad to a USB stick! ;-)

Created with flickr slideshow.

Victor Gonzalvez from SEAE made a presentation on MAPs in Mediterranean countries in general. The session closed with a presentation by me, on agriMoodle, as an adapted version of the popular Moodle platform, for delivering online agriculture-related courses. The presentation was based on a paper that we have recently submitted to the AGRIS Online Journal, describing the agriMoodle platform to be used by Herbal.Mednet during the online trainings which are to take place mainly during the summer of 2014. For some strange reason, for once more I found myself as the last in the list of presenters for the specific section and we had already ran out of time when I started my presentation; as a result, I had to skip some slides and make a summary of the others and this was not exactly how I have planned my presentation. However, I am always flexible and easy-going, so there was nothing wrong with that. I have to admit that the audience was really interested in the presentation, a fact I really enjoyed!

Overall, it was a nice opportunity for Herbal.Mednet project partners to expose their experiences and knowledge to a wider audience and I believe that the partners made good use of this opportunity. It was also an interesting contribution to the whole Conference, providing a set of presentations on MAPs, which receive an increased interest by various stakeholders during the last years, due to their useful properties. On top of that, the presentations on the ODS approach and the agriMoodle development provided a view on the educational and learning approaches followed at a European level, both as methodology (ODS) and as actual software tools (agriMoodle).

MTSR 2012

MTSR 2012 - the 6th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference will take place at Cadiz, Spain, between 28-30/11/2012. One of the special tracks will be the 5th International Workshop on "Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food and Environment" (AgroSem2012), to which I also participated last year (as a part of the MTSR 2011 Conference in Izmir, Turkey).

This time I will be more actively involved in the organization of the Workshop, as a member of the Program Committee. Apart from disseminating the Workshop, I am also submitting two research papers as a co-author (one of them is about the recently over Organic.Balkanet project and its use of metadata) and I will get to review some of the submitted paper (hopefully not mine!).

Due to the nature of the Workshop, the VOA3R project is tightly connected to it, so a number of submissions from VOA3R-related authors is expected. After all, Agro-Know and VOA3R are some of the supporters of this workshop!

CerOrganic European Conference

The CerOrganic European Conference titled "Organic Agriculture & Education: Challenges in Training Advisors of organic farmers", took place on Tuesday, December 6th 2011 at the premises of the Institute of Agricultural Sciences (IGE – www.ige.gr). The Conference was organized under the auspices of the CerOrganic LdV EU project (www.cerorganic.eu) and aimed to provide an opportunity for meeting and discussion between scientists and experts from all over Europe, who are involved in the education and training in the field of organic agriculture.

The poster of the CerOrganic European Conference

The Conference included a number of presentations from project partners, who had the opportunity to present the outcomes of the work done during the project. In addition, presentations on related topics were delivered by external, invited speakers including:

• Costas Dritsas (Greek Representative of IFOAM EU Members), presenting the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM)
• Prof. (KR) Christian Stracke from University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), presenting "The Needs for Quality Management, Competence Modelling and Certification in Vocational Education and Training"
• Prof. Stergios Tzortzios from the University of Thessaly (Greece) presenting his previous experience from related LdV projects "EcoJob-AP" and "Eco-Qualify III”
• Prof. Alex Koutsouris, from the Agricultural University of Athens (Greece) presenting "Co-learning facilitation: new roles for OA extension"
• Bas Timmers from the International Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture Training (The Netherlands) presenting "The advisor: the man in the middle"

The Conference consisted of four well-defined and focus sessions on 

1. "Competence-based curriculum in Organic Agriculture training", 
2. "Blended learning Approach in professional training for the Organic Agriculture", 
3. "Quality of vocational training on Organic Agriculture" and 
4. "ICT tools for the vocational training on Organic Agriculture".

I had the opportunity to present (during the last session) the Course Management Platform (MOLE) as it was used by the CerOrganic project during the various training events (both the CerOrganic Training of Trainers Summer School and the Validation Seminars that took place in each user country). The statistics of the usage of this platform were really encouraging after all!

More information about the Conference, including the agenda, poster and brochure can be found in the Conference's wiki page.

EFITA 2011 Conference - Impressions

The EFITA 2011 Conference, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic between July 11-14 is officially over. I had the opportunity to be in the Conference from the beginning on Monday and leave after its closing on Friday. During these days I attended a number of interesting lectures, made a presentation for the Organic.Edunet Web portal (User Satisfaction Analysis) in the EFITA – ICT Adoption Session, was responsible for the VOA3R Workshop (with the precious help from Diane!) and made 3 presentations in that workshop (on behalf of my colleagues from Rural Inclusion, Organic.Lingua and my presentation for Organic.Balkanet). Also I attended and participated in the Rural Inclusion Workshop. All of them on the same day. I didn’t have much time to be prepared for all these, as this trip to Prague was the third (and last) of a series of three consecutive 5-day trips (Maribor, Slovenia for the Organic.Balkanet 4th Project meeting and Malta for the I.S.L.E. Summer School).

Presenting the VOA3R Review Process

During the EFITA Conference I had the opportunity to meet new people from various institutes and make interesting conversations with them. It was also an opportunity for me to meet some of the VOA3R project partners for the first time and some of my old teachers and colleagues, like Prof. Sideridis from AUA (Greece) and Prof. Roman with Maria Toader from USAMVB (Romania). The Conference was really well-organized in various aspects, from the transportation of participants to and from hotels to the nice joint events (the latter gave us the opportunity to taste the local beers/wines and dishes – especially the Monastery event on Thursday evening was really nice!). Internet access was available almost everywhere (but it was not always easy to use laptops, as the clicking sound of the keyboard was really annoying!), staff members provided help all the time and the premises of CULS were really appropriate for such event, especially the smaller rooms hosting the Workshops and various individual sessions.

Family photo of the VOA3R partners after the 2011 VOA3R Workshop

Prague is a really nice place to be, full of sightseeing spots, easy access to most places through the well-organized public transportation system and nice places to have a beer/snack/lunch. The existence of the river in the city was really amazing, especially when combined with all these sights around. However, I was in the unpleasant position to have my luggage forgotten in the intermediate stop to Geneva so I arrived in Prague only with my backpack, containing only my gadgets (netbook, digicam, mobile phone etc.), but with no clothes. I had to spent a full day with the same clothes and some complimentary stuff provided by SWISS in a really nice messenger bag (e.g. toothbrush/toothpaste, shampoo/shower gel, shaving stuff etc.). It was really strange to be at the Conference wearing my bermudas and a not-so-formal shirt!
I found the Conference really interesting and a nice way to promote and disseminate your work. I just wish I had more time to wander around Prague…

EFITA 2011 Conference

This trip to Prague for the EFITA 2011 Conference will be the last one of the series of 5-days trips during the last month. I am here to make a couple of presentations about the Organic.Edunet Web portal and to support the organization of two workshops (well, mostly the VOA3R one).

The trip didn't start well, as my luggage was left in Geneva, where I changed flight from Athens to Prague. This led to me wandering around the conference with my short pair of trousers and looking really casual... I was really annoyed about that, as well as by the fact that I was informed that there have been two bookings for me at the Hotel!

Some of the giveaways I received from Swiss in order to stand a day without my luggage

The 1st day of the Conference went pretty well, with a wide variety of topics and presentations. Tomorrow I will take some time to work on my presentations and study the organization of the two workshop that I will participate in (VOA3R and Rural Inclusion). Wednesday will be a full, hard day so I'd better be prepared!

vprot next to the Rural Inclusion poster @ the Poster session of EFITA 2011