AGINFRA PLUS D8.2 - Dissemination & Awareness Report

AGINFRA PLUS aspired to provide a sustainable channel addressing adjacent but not fully connected user communities around Food & Agriculture, by exploiting core European e-infrastructures such as EGI.eu, OpenAIRE and D4Science. To this end, the project developed, extended and provided the necessary specifications and components for allowing the rapid and intuitive development of variegating data analysis workflows, where the functionalities for data storage and indexing, algorithm execution, results visualization and deployment are provided by specialized services utilizing European large-scale, cloudbased
infrastructure assets.
Furthermore, AGINFRA PLUS aspired to establish a framework facilitating the transparent documentation, exploitation and publication of research assets (datasets, mathematical models, software components result and publications), in order to enable their reuse and repurposing from the wider research community. Thus, the vision of AGINFRA PLUS project was to develop a common technical infrastructure that could initially serve three user communities (namely, Agro-climatic and Economic Modelling, Food Safety & Risk Assessment and Food Security) and it could be evolved to an AGINFRA food cloud demonstrator that could be positioned as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)1 agri-food thematic cloud.

WP8 concentrates on the dissemination of the project and its results among the identified target groups by using online and offline dissemination channels and activities. More specifically, WP8 focused on creating awareness and engaging further the scientific communities that are related to each one of the three user communities of the project (namely, Agro-climatic and Economic Modelling, Food Safety & Risk Assessment and Food Security) and (b) creating general awareness about AGINFRA PLUS and the types of innovative services that scientists may use, in other scientific communities and networks (Task 8.2). Moreover, linking AGINFRA PLUS with international initiatives and networks that are working on open, big and interoperable data for agriculture and nutrition towards contributing to the corresponding standardisation work falls within the scope of WP8 under Task 8.3. Additionally, alignment of the work held in AGINFRA PLUS with the conception, development and deployment of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and its integration with the existing core e-infrastructures is part of Task 8.4. Furthermore, adopting a more sustainable plan for engaging SMEs in the project falls within the recommendations and instructions that we received after the Mid-Term review regarding the number of engaged to our project SMEs. Finally, WP8 managed to establish a sustainable legal entity form (through a not-for-profit association) for the further operation and evolution of AGINFRA PLUS as a joint venture of involved
stakeholders of innovative services that scientists may use, in other scientific communities and network (Task 8.5).

WP8 has created an online platform (including project website and social media channels) and a set of printed dissemination materials to promote the project (Annex Ε). By the end of the project, the project website has been visited by 2.257 people (unique visitors). The social media channels count 265 community members (Facebook), 987 followers (Twitter) and 777 readers (Medium).
Finally, the project has organized 32 major events with selected group of researchers and practitioners (see Section 4.1 and Annex A, Annex B and Annex C). Moreover, the project has conducted 85 AGINFRA PLUS presentations and panel participations at scientific conferences, workshops and other events and was represented at 8 conferences and fairs with a booth or distributing leaflets (see Section 4 and Annex D). In total, more than 5.000 stakeholders have been reached and 21 scientific publications were
published (See Section 6).

This deliverable describes online and offline dissemination channels, as well as activities, which were conducted until the end of the project. Moreover, it provides an outlook of the dissemination activitiesn that were implemented in order to increase project’s engagement with SMEs. The collaboration of AGINFRA project with other EU and international projects by providing tools and services is demonstrated along with a description of the data journals created for the project. Finally, Key Performance Indicators
are described and applied to measure the effectiveness of dissemination