Blog Presidents’ News – 12/2020

Greetings from EUROGI,

In this letter, I will focus on issues related to our Projects Portfolio Group, which is led by Maurice Barbieri, our ExCom member who represents SOGI, the Swiss national GI association.
The aim of this Group is to enable EUROGI to participate in EU (or other entities’) funded projects that are relevant for our sector and our members.  In effect EUROGI would become a conduit for our members, and their own members where appropriate, to undertake activities in their own countries.

EUROGI, particularly through its members who are distributed in different countries across Europe,  is very well placed to make a variety of value adding contributions at individual country level, in particular regarding networking, publicity and marketing and generally raising awareness of new products, procedures or services which are being produced as part of these projects.  We also have a role in identifying national and sectoral potential stakeholder needs and perspectives.
More specifically, the kinds of activities which our members could undertake include, holding webinars, making presentations at national conferences, running workshops, taking stands at fairs, exhibitions or conferences, running surveys or conducting interviews both on-line or through face-to-face contact.  An important feature of EUROGI contributions at a national level is that the exchanges can be undertaken in the recipients’ national language, although write-up of national events would be in English.

Back to the Projects Portfolio Group, EUROGI was invited to join a consortium making a submission which focusses on developing products and processes which would better monitor surface water quality using AI and other tools, and outline remedial measures.  In its first try, the proposal was not yet successful, but the consortium coordinator is currently restructuring the proposal taking account of the EU’s evaluators comments such that in revised form it could be submitted in response to another relevant call.

Currently the Group is engaged with EARSC, to determine exactly what EUROGI’s contributions would be to projects such as e-shape.  The consortium leader is very keen to secure EUROGI involvement so we are hopeful that in 2021 we will be able to get our members involved in this project.

By the way, to follow up recent activities, as reported in our member-newsletter from SOGI, the seminar they’ve announced and to which we were invited went well.
Dr. Geri Schrotter said: “On November 17th, we tried to interact through a webinar. In total, you were 160 participants at this event, and I thank you for your time and interest. Presentations and videos are available at any time on the following website: https://www.sogi.ch/fr/reseaux/geowebinaire . We hope that our future events will have such a great success ! On behalf of SOGI, I would like to thank all the participants and everyone who helped shape this webinar. I look forward to the next event!”

Enough for now. If you would like to find out more about our project activities or other topics, please don’t hesitate to be in contact with our secretariat at secretariat@eurogi.org.

Bye for now, and keep safe!

Hans Breemersch
EUROGI President