On the 19th and 20th of June, 2023, the INCENTIVE partnership met in Vilnius, Lithuania, for the project’s sixth consortium meeting. The meeting was organised and hosted by the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, which is one of the four pilot universities of the project. The event marked the beginning of the last semester of the project – which kicked off in February 2021 and is ending in January 2024. As such, the partnership is currently working to deliver the final results of INCENTIVE, with the sustainability phase and the organisation of the upcoming EU-wide policy roundtable, as well as the Final Conference being widely discussed among partners.
During the 2-day meeting, partners had the opportunity to present in detail the work that they had carried out since last March, focusing on the different results, challenges, and metrics. A big part of the meeting was devoted to the achievements, lessons learned, and sustainability measures for the continuous operation of the Citizen Science Hubs by the 4 pilot universities: UT, UAB, AUTH, and VGTU. Under this framework, the representatives of the Hubs signed an internal Memorandum of Collaboration, committing their universities to keep cooperating and mutually supporting each other towards the sustainability and upscale of their Hubs.
In parallel, partners brainstormed on the organisation of the upcoming Policy Roundtable of the project, which will be held in Brussels on the 18th of September, in concert with sister project TIME4CS. The scope of the initiative is the discussion and validation of the INCENTIVE and TIME4CS projects’ findings, and their potential impact on policy and policymaking at the EU level. More information on the event will follow soon.
Partners also discussed the upcoming Final Conference of INCENTIVE. The Conference will take place on the 1st of November 2023, at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, and will be a joint event with TIME4CS. The Conference will be organised in the aftermath of the international Citizen Science for Health conference in order to target the wider CS community at the European level. More information will follow during the next weeks about registrations and the agenda.
Overall, the meeting surpassed our expectations and we are now looking forward to the final phase of the project!
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