The FAIRshare Annual Meeting was held in Athens on the 21st and 22nd of November 2019. The meeting was organised jointly by both Teagasc and AUA.
A total of 28 delegates attended the two-day event which included an overview of the progress of each Work Package (WP) as well as a number of workshops:
Workshop on Motivation and Advisor Uptake of DATS – Alexandros Koutsouris from AUA hosted a workshop on focusing on advisors’ motivations to use DATS. Brainstorming and card sorting were again both used to form a participatory exercise.
‘Good Practice’ workshop – John Hyland from Teagasc provided a presentation on good practices and why they are important and what characteristics they share. For instance, a good practice should be at least:
- Implemented with positive results;
- Successful, (innovative), tested and validated: it contributes to the improved performance of an entrepreneurship/farm/organisation and this contribution is recognised;
- Transferable: it can be adopted in and adapted to other contexts.
Good practices were described as integral to the “capitalisation process” enabling the project to take advantage of already existing practices and to use them to create tangible “capital” of knowledge and improved performance.
Responsible Research Workshop – Áine Regan from Teagasc provided a short introductory presentation explaining RRI. Afterwards partners were invited to take part in a participatory workshop on the topic. Participants were divided into four groups (with approximately 5-7 participants per group). The workshop consisted of three inter-linked exercises.
Resuming, FAIRshare accomplished a highly promising first year of activities which have laid the foundational framework for the collection of innovative Digital Advisory Tools and Services (DATS) being used by agricultural extension services across Europe.
The first year of the project primarily concerned activities and tasks pertaining to WP1; developing a Permanent Networking Facility (PNF) with pan-European online search and inventory of DATs.
Through different project activities and discussions amongst project partners a wide overview of main factors characterising DATS emerged. These initial steps will guide the collection of DATS and future project accomplishments.
WP7 (communication and dissemination), WP8 (project management), and WP9 (ethical requirements) were all also active throughout Year 1 whilst at the end of the period both WP2 and WP3 also commenced.