COLLABORATION

Collaboration between institutions is greater now than ever before. The rapid growth of communications technologies, the lowering costs of travel, increasing multilingualism and open borders have enabled greater transnational collaboration. Nobody has supported collaboration more than the European Union through projects and mobility grants. Yet as the scale of the climate crisis becomes evident and EU and national governments adopt more ambitious environmental goals towards a climate neutral EU by 2050, we can no longer ignore the environmental impact of our European project work.

THE ROLE OF COVID 19

The recent epidemic of Covid-19 has cancelled hundreds of events and shows how reliant we are on face-to-face meetings – while adding value and enriching collaboration, proves that we also need to find alternatives.

The range of sophisticated virtual meeting and collaboration platforms keeps evolving are an evidence that “in many circumstances, online collaboration is actually preferable to in-person collaboration” and that the problem is not the availability of technology per se, but our deficient skills in using it: “most of the people are not familiar with working productively in a virtual environment.”

OBJECTIVE

The ONE project’s clear goal is to increase the environmental knowledge and digital communication and collaboration competences of HE leaders and staff, to carry out multi-national projects successfully with only ONE transnational partner meeting.

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

The first tangible results of the project will be the intellectual outputs:

•  IO1 “The Business Case for ONE-meeting projects” – A high profile report (document) with supporting materials such as an Executive Summary, animated video explainers and infographics that raise awareness about the importance of introducing more virtual/remote meetings and reducing the environmental impact of transnational partner meetings.
• IO2 “ONE Virtual Collaboration Toolkit” – After an extensive audit of meeting, project planning, creativity and collaboration software and tools, we showcase the best in the toolkit with practical guidance on how to integrate them and make the most of them.
• IO3 “All-you-need-to-know Guide to Running ONE-meeting projects” A practical guide that complements  output one, by presenting a step-by-step strategy for converting your next projects to one meeting only. It looks at changes you need to make and the technology you can use at each step of project planning, implementation, and evaluation and follow up.