Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COALESCE (Coordinated Opportunities for Advanced Leadership and Engagement in Science Communication in Europe)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-04-01 al 2024-03-31
-Transform the knowledge consolidated from SwafS-19, H2020, HE, and national scicomm projects into valuable resources and tools for the Competence Centre through co-creation processes: The transformation of knowledge consolidated in scicomm projects will be an ongoing process throughout the project’s lifetime by applying the COALESCE SciComm Innovation cycle, ready to be launched in the first platform release. The cycle is being applied and further validated within the project itself, to identify the needs of the different target audiences and co-produce new resources that are usable in different contexts and for different purposes. In parallel, advances have been made to define the virtual platform metadata for the database (currently 100 resources), which will be continuously updated to feed multiple tools and resources to be developed under the project.
-Establish and coordinate the COALESCE network of N&R hubs as the physical venues for developing the participatory activities and exploiting the COALESCE resources beyond the scope of the project: The Competence Centre will operate under a virtual platform connected to a network of 20 national and regional hubs to be established outside the consortium, in the EU27 + the UK and Ukraine. A yearly period of expressions of interest will be announced. For the first year, 5 organisations from Portugal, France, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Turkey have been enrolled. They constitute, together with the 8 countries of the consortium’s partner organisations, the first cohort of hubs. An internal document sets criteria for enrollment, management, and communication. Moreover, mutual learning and exploitation meetings took place to learn from other national and EU level successful cases.
-Establish and coordinate the COALESCE Communities of knowledge and practice (CoP): The COALESCE CoP, currently with 600 members, was established building on previous SwafS-19 CoPs, including quadruple helix stakeholders, scicommers, and journalists, following an activities plan in connection with a communication and dissemination plan. So far, more than 300 people have been involved in more than 20 co-creation activities. This has further created opportunities to increase networking and mutual learning for excellent, trustworthy, and rapidly mobilised scicomm.
-Actively involve scicomm (inter)national and regional networks, scientific and journalist networks, and University Alliances (UA): COALESCE has continued to involve and expand its external stakeholder panel composed so far by 9 scicomm (inter)national and regional networks, 5 scientific and 5 journalist networks, 4 UA, 5 science policy organisations, and 7 EU projects. These will further participate in activities and events to co-create and validate resources, support mainstreaming excellent scicomm in the ERA, encourage institutional changes to recognise scicomm practices within academia, and produce policy recommendations for long-term impact.