Friday, June 6, 2014

Herbal.Mednet 4th project meeting

Some weeks ago I was asked to represent Agro-Know in the 4th project meeting of the Herbal.Mednet project, replacing my colleague Andreas who would not be available at that time (4-6/6/2014). That would be a nice opportunity for me to get to see old friends like the local hosts of the project, as well as the rest of the project consortium, which I have met in the previous project meetings. Despite the fact that I am not directly involved in the project, I always keep an eye on its progress and outcomes and of course I am checking out how the agriMoodle platform developed by Organic.Lingua is (going to be) used by the Herbal.Mednet project.

Flights were booked (direct ones!), hotel room was booked, arrangements were made so I found myself in Bucharest, outside my hotel at about 11.30 in the morning. However, the room would not be ready before 13.30, so I decided to leave my stuff and take a walk around the city. The walk in the huge park near Arcul de Triumf should have been refreshing; however, the weather was rather warm and humid, so walking around was rather difficult.

The first day of the meeting started early in the afternoon of 4/6 and was dedicated to the results received by the Spanish National Agency after the interim reporting. Some issues were identified and solutions were proposed for the partners responsible to address them. The meeting took longer than expected, due to the fruitful discussions among the project partners. This time, we had the pleasure to meet two new faces in the consortium: Marta di Pierro from Associazione Italiana per l’Agricoltura Biologica (AIAB), Italy, Italy, which replaced the ex-partner SERIFO and Kostas Gardikis from Apivita, replacing Tasos Choukalas who usually represents the company in the project meetings. In both cases, we were really glad to meet the new persons, who managed to positively affect the meeting with their fresh ideas.

The participants of the Herbal.Mednet 4th project meeting

The second day of the meeting included discussions on the financial aspects of the project and the remaining issues to be resolved. Apart from that, the plan for the pilots in each user country was presented in some details, while additional presentations provided information on the progress related to the revisions of the project's website and the course management platform to be used for delivering the online courses. During the afternoon of the 2nd day, we had the pleasure to meet Prof. Vicente Castell-Zeising from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, who is a member of SEAE as well. The 2nd day ended with a classy joint dinner provided by our local hosts (Prof. Roman and Dr. Maria Toader).

The 3rd day of the meeting included the participation of the project consortium in the "Agriculture for Life, Life for Agriculture" International Conference, the first session of which was dedicated to presentations from the Herbal.Mednet project partners.

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