The VAX-TRUST consortium met in Rome
This is a news item written by research fellow Aapo Kuusipalo from the Tampere University (TAU) team. TAU is the Coordinator of VAX-TRUST and leader of Work Packages 1, 8 and 9.
2022 has been a busy year in the VAX-TRUST project, with the gathering of ethnographic data and its analysis proving to be every bit as rewarding as expected. The VAX-TRUST consortium gathered in Rome on the 3rd and 4th of November 2022 for an in-person meeting following successful collaboration on the team ethnography phase of Work Package 4. A total of 28 team members from nine partner organisations were able to participate in-person, with one partner without on-site representation participating remotely.
Sunny and warm (especially from a Finnish perspective) Rome offered the perfect background for fruitful discussions on the shift to the design of interventions and their evaluation linked to Work Packages 5 and 6. The two long working days featured reflections on ideal collaboration practices, as well as presentations outlining a shared framework for intervention design and preliminary ideas for VAX-TRUST interventions in each target region. Alongside this formal agenda, the in-person meeting also enabled more informal, but equally fruitful, discussions on, for example, the intricacies of working in a multinational consortium with varying national and regional contexts.
For a consortium sharing common goals but mainly working together remotely, a chance to collaborate, share ideas, and generally interact face-to-face, is simply priceless. Long days spent together also allow for extended discussions, which can be difficult to facilitate in quite the same manner remotely. In all, the Rome meeting proved to be every bit as beneficial to the attainment of project goals as could be expected.