On 8-9 March the 19 projects from the BlueBio Cofunded Call, met online for their mid-term meeting. The mid-term meeting was the culmination of the mid-term evaluation of the projects, one and a half years into their duration. The projects of the Cofunded Call were all launched during spring 2020 with a kick-off in June 2020 and started before 1 September the same year. The mid-term was an opportunity for the project coordinators to meet and greet both each other and the funding partners, to see how far they have come in these challenging times.
The purpose of the mid-term meeting was for each project to present their progress and provide an opportunity for the Project Coordinators to exchange ideas, as well as receiving information on ethics, communication and Human Capacity Building. To achieve some of the face-to-face interactive feeling, the BlueBio coordinators had prepared ice-breakers and brainstorming sessions with polls and word-cloud making. These sessions were organised both to get things going in the beginning and in between presentations to clear the mind.
After each project presentation there was a Q&A session intended to foster coordination and future collaboration among the projects. The discussions were fruitful and constructive, and it is wonderful to see that there is a sense of community among the projects even though they have not met in person yet. The projects all presented interesting results, dissemination efforts, scientific papers that have been published and some have also initiated additional collaborations between the BlueBio projects. We are happy that so much interaction and synergy has blossomed between the projects, even during these two years with the pandemic.
Recording from the meeting can be found here: