AGINFRA PLUS D8.2 - Dissemination &amp; Awareness Report
Creators: name: Candela, Leonardo
name: Ballis, Athanasios
name: Kakaletris, George
name: Lokers, Rob
name: Knapen, Rob
name: Filter, Matthias
name: Neveu, Pascal
name: Boizet, Alice
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018
Subjects: food; agriculture; e-infrastructure; climate change; food safety; dissemination channels; nutrition; Virtual Research Environments;

description: AGINFRA+ aspires to provide a sustainable channel addressing adjacent but not fully connected user communities around Food &amp; Agriculture, by exploiting core European e-infrastructures such as EGI.eu, OpenAIRE, EUDAT and D4Science. To this end, the project develops, extends and provides 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, cloud-based infrastructural assets.

Furthermore, AGINFRA+ aspires to establish a framework facilitating the transparent documentation, exploitation and publication of research assets (datasets, mathematical models, software components and publications), to enable their reuse and repurposing from the wider research community. Thus, the vision of AGINFRA+ project is to develop a common technical infrastructure that could initially serve three user communities (namely, Agro-climatic and Economic Modelling, Food Safety &amp; Risk Assessment and Food Security) and it could be evolved to an AGINFRA food cloud demonstrator that will 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 focuses 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 &amp; Risk Assessment and Food Security) and (b) creating general awareness about AGINFRA+ and the types of innovative services that scientists may use, in other scientific communities and networks (Task 8.2). Moreover, linking AGINFRA+ 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+ 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. Finally, WP8 aims at establishing a sustainable legal entity form (through a not-for-profit association) for the further operation and evolution of AGINFRA+ 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 until M18 an online infrastructure (including project website and social media channels) and a set of print dissemination materials to promote the project (Annex D). By the end of M18, the project website has been visited by 523 people (unique visitors). The social media channels count 251 community members (Facebook) and 849 followers (Twitter). These numbers are expected to be further increased as soon as additional tangible results are available via the deployed Virtual Research Environments (VREs) for the targeted project communities.

Finally, the project has organized 13 major events with selected group of researchers and practitioners (see Section 3.1 and Annex A and Annex B). Moreover, the project has conducted 29 AGINFRA+ presentations and panel participations at scientific conferences, workshops and other events and was represented at 4 conferences and fairs with a booth or distributing leaflets (see Section 3.2 and Annex B). In total, more than 4615 stakeholders have been reached and 7 scientific publications (3 journal papers, 2 conference papers and 1 book chapter) were published or have submitted for publication (See Section 3.3 and Annex C). This deliverable describes online and offline dissemination channels, as well as activities, which were conducted until M18 of the project. Moreover, it provides an outlook of the dissemination activities that are planned for the next 18 months of the project, namely M19-M36. Furthermore, Key Performance Indicators are described and applied to measure the effectiveness of dissemination until M18 and allow measuring the progress in the next 18 months of the project.