Networking events redefined: The example of LIFE Cyclamen

Does your experience from a project's networking event include a typical (usually boring) set of presentations by the invited speakers followed by a Q&A session over a cup of coffee and slides of cake - all these taking place at a meeting room of a university or a hotel?

Well, we're talking about something totally different here!

The LIFE Cyclamen project team was kind enough to invite me to their networking event that took place on December 12, 2019 at Nicosia, Cyprus. I would be one of the just three speakers and was asked to present the LIFE GAIA Sense project. It was like a follow-up from our recent contact during the Greek LIFE Task Force Networking Workshop, earlier in 2019.

There were no time slots, no agenda (at least not published), no strict starting time; just lots of dissemination and buzz around the event. The event would take place in the evening, starting at 18.00.

I was intrigued.

As I expected the audience to be diverse (and more focused on the environment) I prepared a new set of slides for the occasion, providing many definitions as simply as possible and avoiding the typical, full-text slides presenting the project.


The event took place at 1010 Hall, a carefully designed gallery-style hall which also included a large room suitable for presentations. We were welcomed by a cocktail-style reception, where we had the opportunity to go through a high number of project (and organizations') posters and discuss with the participants over a glass of wine (or two!). I personally had the opportunity to meet about a dozen people from various relevant (to my case) organizations - mostly research and academic institutions, with whom we exchanged experiences and ideas for future collaborations.

The number of people kept increasing and we finally were invited to the main hall of the place, where a projector was setup and people were seated at bar-style stools. We, the presenters, were presenting while standing - I love this, because it allows me to move from left to right and get close to the projection, highlighting on the screen parts of what I am presenting. I loved the setup!

The event concluded with a nice finger food buffet, with various local dishes and lots of drinks (both highly appreciated). This definitely helped in creating a relaxed atmosphere, where people had the opportunity to talk to the speakers and get more information on their presentations.

I was excited to have another half a dozen of participants approaching me one after the other and asking about various aspects of the LIFE GAIA Sense project and the gaiasense smart farming system, exploring opportunities for collaboration in the context of the same (or even another) LIFE project. I talked with people from the public sector, private companies, NGOs, LIFE project beneficiaries etc. exchanging information about our organizations, our work and potential collaboration.

I admit I didn't have the time to grab something to eat, as people kept coming one after the other. I am a foodie but trust me, I didn't mind at all! We talked about crops not yet covered by smart farming, production issues common between Cyprus and Greece, work of common interest in different projects, ideas for participation in common events etc.

What I especially liked was the fact that even though the attendance was not really high, participants were really into it and their vast majority got engaged in relevant discussions before and after the presentations. And in the end, this is what matters.

Not your typical networking event I guess!

Huge thanks to the LIFE Cyclamen team for the excellent communication, organization and dissemination of the event and for making this trip one of the best in my 10 years of traveling all over Europe - all my participation details were taken care of. And of course for inviting me to this special event :-)

Some thoughts on linking data sources / Bringing down the data silos

Agriculture and silos are two terms which play nice together, when referring to agricultural products; silos provide a nice mean of storing large volumes of harvested crops and provide a controlled environment for their post-harvesting management. However, when referring to agricultural data, one may safely claim that the data silos are dead. In fact, they exist but it is only a matter of time before they are either linked with existing backbones or they eventually disappear. Nikos Manouselis has already presented this "data silos" issue very nicely in a really interesting presentation - don't you agree?

Improving dissemination of content from Nikos Manouselis

Let me express my personal experiences here: My first contact with EU funded educational and research projects was the Organic.Edunet eContentPlus project, which managed to create a network of content providers on organic agriculture, agroecology and other green topics. These content providers followed a unique methodology for creating metadata records for their educational resources (=harmonization) and these metadata became available through a single point of access, which is the Organic.Edunet Web portal. This was a case of harmonization, networking and public exposure.

Then other projects (ICT-PSP, FP7) came in which I was also involved, like VOA3R, Organic.Lingua and agINFRA. What do these projects have in common? All of them were based or at least included large volumes of work on metadata harmonization, linking between different data sources, making data and metadata public. They managed to interconnect various digital data sources like institutional repositories, digital libraries, databases and educational repositories, applying a harmonization layer (e.g. the application of a common metadata standard/schema, the use of common vocabularies and other KOSs etc), providing a linked data layer for linking heterogeneous data sources and aggregating data and metadata from the homogeneous ones. In fact, this linked agricultural data layer is in my opinion one of the most interesting and important outcomes of the agINFRA project. Using KOS (Knowledge Organization Systems) as the backbone, various heterogeneous data sources can be linked as long as they are published online. Another related case was the mapping between the Organic.Edunet ontology and the AGROVOC thesaurus, which took place in the context of the Organic.Lingua project, which was another step in the direction towards linked data. I also feel really glad to be (even partially) involved in a work that it taking place towards the publication of germplasm and other biodiversity data as linked data, something that will allow the linking of these resources to other types of data like bibliographic and educational resources.

There are also cases of linking on a higher, global level compared to the project-based one; the case of the Research Data Alliance (RDA which aims to enhance the accessibility of research data and enable all stakeholders to get access to them. RDA provide a mean for projects like the ones mentioned earlier and other initiatives (like FAO, CIARD, IFPRI and INRA, just to mention a few) to join their forces, share the effort and resources and make a leap forward. Another case is the Global Food Safety Partnership (GFSP), which aims to provide a centralized mean of access to food safety capacity building, by engaging stakeholders from both the public and the private sector. Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) is another global initiative which aims to support global efforts to make agricultural and nutritionally relevant data available, accessible, and usable for unrestricted use worldwide through the participation of public and private sector bodies. The G8 International Conference on Open Data for Agriculture which took place in April 2013 boosted the development and progress of such initiatives by highlighting the need for opening access to data related to agriculture by setting the landscape and define possible next steps in this direction. It managed to identify the needs and engage key stakeholders, among others.

Taking all these into consideration, it is hard for anyone to believe that in this era of linking and interlinking there is still space for data silos. While there are also cases where data cannot be publicly exposed and shared (e.g. patents, privately funded research work, personal data to name a few), the approach of linking and openly publishing/exposing data seems to be the only way towards ensuring the sustainability of these data and the involvement of all stakeholders. In the end, it is up to each data manager individually to decide if he/she will jump on the train and be a part of the future or just remain a part of the history. ;-)

Talking about data silos and data pools

Yesterday I was invited to participate and present in a meeting about networking projects about climate change. It was a meeting organized in the context of the OLIVE CLIMA - LIFE11 ENV/GR/000942 project and the participants (about 40 people) were mainly Greek agricultural researchers working in the same or related LIFE-funded projects, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Rural Development and Food and the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change. The meeting was hosted at the lovely premises of the Forest Research Institute, at Ilisia, Athens, Greece located within a large hill park.

During the introduction to the meeting, my friend Dr. George Koubouris highlighted the fact that the audience consisted of researchers who are working in the same context, share the same or similar research interests but still they were not familiar with each other. This was one of the points that I would like to highlight in my presentation, focusing on efforts like the VOA3R portal for networking agricultural researchers and of course AgriVIVO. During the presentations made by the project partners, I also realized the need for a centralized repository to host all their research outcomes (at least the ones developed in the context of their projects) so that they could be more easily accessible by a wider audience.

George Koubouris presenting

 My presentation was based on existing material developed for the dissemination purposes of agINFRA and was focused on the need for moving from the existing data silos (e.g. the individual and not (inter)connected web sites of the projects hosting the project's outcomes) to data pools (which would provide the opportunity for these outcomes to be reached by a much wider audience). There was also a short demonstration of the VOA3R portal, as a mean for Greek researchers to find a virtual space for sharing, creating their own community/communities and finding a common ground to for further collaboration. Unfortunately it had to be really short, it was the last one in the programme and there was already a significant delay in the original schedule.

The advantages of having the last presentation; your last slide remains there for longer!

The participants seemed to be interested in the contents of the presentation, as it was pointing exactly to their needs; I expect that to happen in each agINFRA presentation anyway, as the project is really promising. During the round table session, which was the last part of the meeting, agINFRA was proposed as the mean that they could use for making their collection publicly available in case they are interested. Specific questions were raised, mainly related to the licenses and rights that should be used for sharing their research outcomes, so CC Licenses as well as the existence of Data Exchange Agreements and Memorandi of Understanding.

Presenting the agINFRA approach on data pools