Kick-off Meeting - EU STEM Coalition project: "Towards a European STE(A)M Platform"

Kick-off Meeting - EU STEM Coalition project: "Towards a European STE(A)M Platform"

Date: 
20 February 2020
Host organisation: 
EU STEM Coalition
Country: 
Belgium
City & meeting location: 
Brussels (Neth-ER office)
Short summary: 

The project "Towards a European STE(A)M Platform" (Erasmus+ KA3 Forward Looking Cooperation Project) was officially kicked off on February 20, 2020. The project aims to evolve the current EU STEM Coalition network into a full-fledged EU-level support centre for the national and regional STEM platforms as countries, regions and other stakeholders outside the network through a range of new and upscaled support actions, better EU-level (comparative) documentation and a new, more scalable decentralised structure of the network. 

Objective of the meeting: 

The goal of the meeting was to brief the partner organisations directly involved in the project on the overall objectives, key-elements and implementation of the project. 

Description: 

The meeting covered three main parts (see meeting agenda). The full minutes of the meeting can be reviewed by project partners only through the members' dashboard by logging in with your personal user account (see bottom-right of the page).

 

  1. Welcome and introduction
    The project coordinator (Geert Asselbergs, PTvT) provides a brief overview of the meeting programme and house rules. One of the project partners is absent (UPSTI). A Skype meeting has been scheduled with this project partner to catch up.

     

  2. Objective of the project
    After a short round of introductions, the project coordinator presents the objectives of the project, its core-elements and expected impact to refresh everyone’s memory since some months have passed since submitting the proposal. The handout includes a schematic overview of the main objectives, expected impact, project activities and work package structure (see meeting documents). For the newer partners a bit of general background on the EU STEM Coalition network is also presented (see slides).

     

  3. Roundtable and questions
    A first round of questions are discussed and answered by the project team. 

     

  4. Implementation of the project
    The project coordinator presents how the project will be implemented, including who does what, what needs to be done by each partner and when and how we will keep track of the big picture. The diagrams on the slides provide an overview of the division of labour, partner roles, etc. Some snippets of the original proposal are also shown to highlight the demand-driven structure of the project.

     

  5. Roundtable and questions + short exercise
    A second round of questions is discussed by the project team followed by a short team-excercise.

     

  6. Update General Assembly
    A representative of the Liason office of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) gives a brief presentation on the NRW platform (ZDI – also a project partner) and the STEM situation in Germany.

     

  7. Project management and finances
    A brief presentation is given by the project coordinator on the management and finances of the project. This includes a general overview of the financial structure, eligible expenses, reporting, payments and audits, the co-financing element and finally the first ‘homework’ and next steps for each partner.

     

  8. Roundtable and questions
    A final round of questions is discussed.
     
Next steps: 

As a next step, a bilateral Skype meeting was planned with each partner to collect the necessary administrative information and walk each partner through the differen project management tools that were created for the project. The first General Assembly meeting has been scheduled for June 18, 2020 and will be hosted by ZDI (Germany).