FAIRshare – Taking stock of the first year

By Dr John Hyland (Teagasc – Project Coordination)

FAIRshare (Farm Advisory Digital Innovation Tools Realised and Shared) launched in November 2018.  The project has just 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) that are being used by agricultural extension services across Europe.

Year 1 of the project primarily concerned activities and tasks pertaining to Work Package 1; 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.

To summarise, we are proud to share with you some of the many project activities that FAIRshare has conducted in its first year:

  • The project Kick-Off-Meeting took place in Dublin where Teagasc led a training workshop based on state-of-the-art Participatory and Multi-actor Approaches;
  • The methodological standards which will be applied in regards to collecting DATS were finalised;
  • Continued development of a semantic webtool for advisers to find digital solutions that match farmers’challenges;
  • The first steps in setting up multi-actor groups to support learning from advisor/farmer digital interfaces;
  • FAIRshare was represented at the FARMDEMO Conference that took place in Brussels (May, 2019);
  • The first face-to-face Management Committee meeting took place in Brussels where Work Package leaders liaised together on the future direction of the project (June, 2019);
  • Prof Tom Kelly (Teagasc) presented FAIRshare to the European Precision Livestock Conference Presentation which took place in Cork (August 2019);
  • Dr Áine Regan (Teagasc) presented on the important role of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Digital Agriculture at a symposium on the implications of digitalisation in agriculture organised by ETH Zurich Agricultural Economics and Policy Group and the World Food System Center (September 2019);
  • Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) workshops were initiated;
  • The project was presented by MAPA to the Datagri conference taking place in Zaragoza (November, 2019).

The RRI workshops being conducted by Teagasc perhaps represent one of the most interactive project activities. Dr Simone van der Burg (WUR) as part of the H2020 IOF2020 project conducted a series of workshops in Italy, The Netherlands, and Poland with farmers, policy-makers, scientists and the agtech industry. In these workshops actors where asked to reflect on data ownership and sharing in digital agriculture and indicate their preferences for future data governance scenarios. Through collaboration with the FAIRshare project, such workshops have been extended to Ireland where broader concerns and preferred solutions for data governance in digital agriculture are investigated.

FAIRshare looks forward to entering a busy and fruitful second year of its five year project lifespan. We strongly encourage you to keep up to date on project activities by following us on twitter and registering for our newsletter. If FAIRshare sounds interesting to you, if you have DATS to share, or if you just want to know more about the project, please don’t hesitate to contact us!