From 19th to 22nd September the WaterInnEU European project, coordinated by CREAF, held its penultimate internal meeting in Bulgaria. The meeting was held along with a stakeholders workshop and a youth involvement session.
These meetings are previous to the launch of the Marketplace created within the project and to its promotion among the water community, so the purpose of the appointment was to clearly leave the platform ready for their exploitation and to receive opinions on the products promoted.
The first session, on 19th September, was dedicated to a youth involvement session aimed at motivating young people to the project activities and in particular to their training in one of the tools promoted, the application for the collection of data Aquasurvey . The meeting took place at the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy in Sofia University and gathered more than twenty teachers and students interested in the possibility of organising virtual and live courses for students from Balkan countries.
In the beatiful Plovdiv, the brokering workshop gathered near 15 stakeholders from the Maritsa river basin interested in the developments of the project. They were informed about the WaterInnEU work and achievements and specially about the near ready-to-launch marketplace and the products it will help to promote.
After the WaterInnEU presentations, they explained some of their challenges in applying the Water Framework Directive in the river basin that often relate to poor data, no tools or interoperability problems. It was clear during the debate that WaterInnEU is trying to address some of these challenges with the products promoted, so clear opportunities for new implementations within the project were detected and planned for the next few months.
On the second day, the internal meeting was basically dedicated to the preparation of the launching of the marketplace (last details, promotion, etc.) and to planning the final phase of the project. The next months will be specially important for the project, as the designed marketplace platform will be launched and the promotion of the products selected will start. The marketplace platform prototype is already working, and in October it will be fully operational and promoted to all the water community. An open e-pitch event is also foreseen on 2th November at 14h in order to promote the selected supported products within the project. The event is open to anybody interested.
