DEMETER celebrated its one year anniversary in September 2020. This represents an ideal opportunity to reflect on the various milestones that have been met across the project.
The project launched in September 2019 where representatives from 60 partner organisations gathered in Waterford, Ireland to discuss the work plan and the upcoming activities. A follow-on project management meeting took place in December in Brussels to recap on the goals of the project and assess the progress made across the various work packages (WP). This was to be in the last in-person meeting of the project, at least for 2020, due to the arrival of COVID-19. However, with online technologies such as Zoom, Mural and Slack in place, the project continues to communicate effectively with regular WP and consortium calls.
Key deliverables have been submitted and any public deliverable that has been approved is available on our website at https://h2020-demeter.eu/deliverables/. The first Technical Review meeting with the European Commission and our external advisors took place on June 16th. The review outlined how the project is moving in the right direction with recommendations on how to maximise the project’s impact. The work across our piloting activity (WP5), technical work packages (WP3&4) and multi-actor approach (WP7) is outlined further on.
DEMETER, alongside our sister project, ATLAS, had originally committed to participate in several events such as the Global IoT week and the SmartAgriHubs event in Bucharest in March 2020. However, the onset of COVID-19 saw these events cancelled. Therefore, both projects ran a joint webinar, with the support of the EU Commission, to promote the projects and engage the relevant stakeholders. The webinar was divided into three sessions beginning with an overview of emerging architectural approaches, implementation and standardisation. Following this how to engage real end users and stakeholders via a multi-actor approach was discussed. To finish, opportunities for new partners to join these exciting projects via cascade funding was outlined. More information on the webinar can be found here .
We have also presented at several conferences and events such as the GIoTS2019, GIoTS2020 (virtual), IEEE IT2020 conference and the EU/Brazil projects twinning webinar. We have participated in policy discussions and meetings such as the workshop on Common European Agricultural Data Space in Digital Europe, the DESIRA2020 Rural Forum and EU Agri events. Our partners have written articles, case studies and blogs for publications including the WFO F@rmLetter, the AgriIDEA magazine and local newspapers such as the Montenegrin local newspaper, DNEVNEnovine. Check out our ‘In the News’ section to see more.
Although the first year of DEMETER has been met by unprecedented circumstances, the project work has not suffered, and activities have been fruitful. We look forward to coming together with our colleagues (hopefully next year!) and continuing to engage our stakeholders.
