Working on the OpenMinTeD dissemination & training activities

OpenMinTeD is having a user meeting between 24-25/2/2016, hosted at the premises of Athena Research Innovation Center. Partners involved in the dissemination and training Work Packages (WP2 & WP3 respectively) had the opportunity to work collaboratively on the joint activities to be undertaken within the next months in the context of these two WPs on the day before - 23/2/2016. Partners from Athena RC (hosts of the meeting and coordinators of the project), LIBER (the WP2 leader), Open University (WP3 leader) and Agroknow attended this pre-meeting.

The discussions focused mainly on the dissemination tools that are already used (such as the project website, Twitter account and blog, for the time being) as well as the envisaged one for the next months (such as a potential Facebook page and the under-preparation project newsletter); the events and workshops that can be considered for dissemination purposes. Potential revisions and ideas for improvement were discussed, mostly on the OpenMinTeD website and blog (powered by Wordpress). This is where our experience with Wordpress, based on the Agroknow blog, was considered useful and may provide some quick fixes for open issues.

Thanks @AgroKnow @OpenAIRE_eu @FrontiersIn @OpenUniversity @i_am_rec @LIBEReurope for a great meeting! #textmining pic.twitter.com/9dGnzUI9T9

— OpenMinTeD (@openminted_eu) February 23, 2016

Events were also discussed in details, mostly LREC 2016 Conference and the RDA 7th plenary meeting. The project will be represented in both events, while additional ones will also be considered

As regards the training activities (WP3), they will focus on the OpenMinTeD platform and the services provided by the project. In addition, training sessions on more generic topics (introductory sessions on the TDM methodologies, advantages for various types of stakeholders, legal and interoperability aspects etc.) will also be considered, especially when training communities that are not exactly familiar with text mining and what it can do for them. In this context, I am excited that Agroknow (and therefore me personally, as I am representing Agroknow in these two WPs) is going to work on a report that will aim to provide the basics of the work to take place within the next months, such as the mapping of the communities to be trained, the curriculum for the trainings (e.g. thematic areas to be covered; it's been quite a long time since I was last involved in something like that but it would be great to apply my past experience in a new context), means to be used for the delivery of the trainings and other parts.

This work will take into consideration the work that has already taken place by Agroknow in WP4, in terms of the analysis of the research communities within the project and will feed the next steps of the Training WP. The deadline for this task is the end of March so I'd better stop blogging and start working on the report!

VOA3R featured in the Focus Europe Journal

Thanks to a tweet from ARI_RD I was informed that the VOA3R project has been featured in the latest issue (October 2012) of the European Journal Focus Europe. The journal is produced by C-E.N.T.E.R. Network (Competence, cooperation and communication in the dissemination and exploitation of EU projects) and aims to highlight European developments and projects, mainly focusing on EU-funded projects. It is an interesting project, that provides a number of dissemination opportunities and tools for EU-funded projects that would like to expose their work and outcomes to a wider audience.

VOA3R partners @ Izmir, Turkey during 4th project meeting

The article about VOA3R is titled "Community-based research, knowledge sharing and publication facilitated by VOA3R" and can be found at page 17. It is a short presentation of the VOA3R project, written by Christian M. Stracke (eLC / University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany), Diane Le Hénaff (INRA, France) and Miguel-Angel Sicilia (University of Alcalá, Spain), all partners of the project (the latter being the coordinator of the project). The article also features a family photo of the project's partners, taken during the 4th project meeting in Izmir, Turkey, collocated with MTSR 2011.

You may find the online version of the journal here.

Preparing for the 4th project meeting of I.S.L.E.

On Monday I am flying to Lisbon, Portugal in order to participate to the I.S.L.E. 4th project meeting as well to the Professionalization fair, which will be collocated and organized by the School of Agronomy of the Technical University of Lisbon, as an ISLE partner.

Clipped from: voa3r.cc.uah.es (share this clip)

This time we have a lot of things to present to the project meeting, and not limited to the dissemination activities that we are responsible for: New project brochure and poster, almost ready-to-send newsletters, a new platform for providing the ISLE project partners a place to meet, share and discuss, revised course management platform and handbooks etc. It is a good thing that almost all these activities were supported by my colleague Andreas, who devoted a significant amount of time for them.

The Professionalization fair will provide us (as Agro-Know) with the opportunity to present our work in various projects related to the area covered by I.S.L.E. I have already packed my suitcase with posters, brochures and leaflets from these projects, while I have a number of slides presenting these projects, that will be played back and forth in my netbook during the Fair. It sounds like a really big event and I am really anxious to see what it's going to be like.

An I.S.L.E project meeting is different than any other project meeting as it always looks like a big family reunion: It is so nice to see people from all over Europe, younger and older, really friendly and full of ideas and share all these days with them not only working but also enjoying the limited free time. Just imagine a consortium consisting of about 39 institutions coming from about 30 different countries - the gathering is just amazing! It is always a pleasure working with this big family and provide as much as possible to the consortium.

Presenting the VOA3R platform in Greece

A partial view of the Workshop's audience
(photo by Maritina Stavrakaki) 

Today I was invited to make a short presentation about the VOA3R project at the "1st Scientific National Workshop about Traditional Varieties" organized at the Agricultural University of Athens, with the Lab of Viticulture being one of the organizers. There must have been more than 60 people in the room during the whole Workshop, mostly agricultural researchers from public institutes, individual agronomists and representatives from the Greek Ministry of Rural Development and Food.

vprot presenting VOA3R project
(photo by Maritina Stavrakaki) 

Even though my presentation was not initially planned, we managed to allocate 10 minutes in the already packed program of the workshop. My presentation consisted of only 10-11 slides, mostly focusing on the VOA3R platform and its usefulness for the specific audience. I also emphasized the option to have the GRNET team create digital repositories for any of the participating research institutes, which could be populated by the researchers and harvested at a later stage, in order to provide access to these research publications through the VOA3R platform. Despite the lack of time and my short presentation, there was some interest about the platform and the possibility of participation from the audience. I was really sorry that I didn't have more time to demonstrate the VOA3R platform real-time and instead I was limited to showing a couple of screenshots but I suppose that it was better than nothing. A video of my short presentation can be found below (it's in Greek - sorry!):

It would be great to see a community of Greek agricultural researchers in VOA3R platform, especially those working on the preservation of local/traditional plant species/varieties... it seems that there is a significant amount of scientific and research outcomes published in Greek national or even regional journals/magazines, with limited impact on the wider research and scholar community. I consider this to be a pity, since these outcomes could be really useful to researchers working in the same areas from all over the world. VOA3R platform could be the solution to providing the tool that could make these research outcomes available to the whole research community of this specific area...