The fourth Transnational Partners Meeting (TPM) for the DIGIFABS project took place on September 4th and 5th at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. The TPM took place in parallel with the in-person portion of the DIGIFABS Student Summer School, which ran in Nitra for two weeks following its online portion of the previous week. The project has already reached significant milestones, with some key project deliverables completed and others that have made considerable progress towards completion.
The meeting began with a review of Summer School Development, with Partners sharing feedback on successful elements and on other elements that could be improved for future Summer Schools. Overall, the feedback was very positive, and the final resource, The Facilitators Kit, is almost ready for publication. This kit will be used as an anchor throughout the SME Goes Digital Challenge by the mentors guiding our student teams through the sensing, seizing, and transforming stages of their respective challenges.
Next, the meeting discussed the implementation of the SME Goes Digital Challenge and the subsequent steps therein. The feedback and insights gained from the Online Bootcamps and the Summer School proved valuable in helping to optimise and adapt elements of the Challenge.
On Friday, the meeting opened with a very constructive and collaborative discussion on the optimisation of the Bootcamps, Summer School and Challenge to ensure effective MOOC creation and dissemination workshop development. Further presentations reported on the overall project Dissemination, the targets already achieved and the plans for dissemination over the next few months. Next, there were presentations on the project sustainability plan and on project quality control. The final session addressed project management and reporting requirements before the meeting concluded. These were especially important for the internal interim reporting.
Partners agreed that it had been an extremely productive meeting, with great progress made on deciding the next steps for the project, and all partners collaborating well to ensure the continued success of DIGIFABS.