New Experiences and Valuable Input during Online Progress Meeting

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak the PECUNIA consortium was not able to meet in person on 16-17 April 2020 for its 3rd Progress Meeting. Instead of strolling along the Spree river in Berlin, the partners met virtually and made the best of it!

For the first part of the meeting, the partner had invited the scientific advisors in order to give them a brief overview of the project activities in the last year. After the break-out session, the advisors highlighted the high-quality results as well as the very good design of the project. Looking at the challenges which the partners are facing with regards to COVID-19, for example concerning data collection, the advisors proposed to consider the current crisis as opportunity to explore new options for conducting the planned focus groups and think aloud interviews online and to learn from that process.

In the afternoon session, the consortium partners focused on current activities and discussion points with regards to Horizontal Activities 3 and 4 as well as Work Package 6, which are the tasks on which the consortium will mainly work until the project end. In this context, the potential deviations due to COVID-19 were discussed as well.

On the next day, exploitation and dissemination activities (Work Packages 7 and 8) were on the agenda. During a dedicated exploitation session, the PECUNIA exploitation strategy and current exploitation activities were presented and discussed, with the overall aim of achieving high impact of the expected project results and future developments.

Even though the online meeting took place successfully and achieved the required goals, the partners missed the networking events and side-talks which usually strengthen the team spirit. This why we are looking forward to the next face-to-face consortium meeting, which will then be the final project meeting.