Hydro-RDI-Network gathered partners to a workshop: Technology and Funding opportunities in hydrological field
Hydro-RDI-network arranged a partner workhop 15th June 2021 with the aim to bring the network’s experts together to hear about the regards from the Hydro-RDI-Network, discuss of common development needs and plan cooperation further. Workshop had 24 participants from 13 different partner organizations, of which 6 represented the companies in the network.
Program included regards from the Hydro-RDI-Network, three key note presentations of the hydrological technology and its applications, and collaborative working with Google Jamboard. First, consortium leader Petteri Alho provided regards from the Hydro-RDI-Network as a project.
Regards from the Hydro-RDI-Network as a project
During the year 2021, we have, for example,
increased the hydrological field’s visibility with
- Web page with around 500 visitors
- LinkedIn Group with over 90 members
- 20 news or articles in 12 medias
- visibility of 2000 readers in its best in social media
- dissemination in 3 external events
as well as increased the knowledge and boosted the collaboration in the field by
- 4 Events that have attracted 71 participants in its best, and
- newletters with 48 receivers
In the current event we also wanted to bring out the yet unutilized opportunities, e.g. technology demo days in the field and company-university exchanges to develop the hydrological methodology and technology together. We are also expecting over 20 scientific articles to be published in the next two years, and we will be writing policy briefs to be published in the final year of the project. Thus, wehave still a lot to be achieved too in the near future, with the aim to grow for the true Finnish competence center of the water sector.
Technology presentations and ideas for future collaboration and funding opportunities
Next in program, we had three interesting presentation from Charles de Jongh (Terratec AS) about Bathymetric lidar, Antti Lindfors (Luode Consulting) about Opportunities and challenges of water quality flow measurement (Veden laadun läpivirtausmittauksen mahdollisuudet ja haasteet) and Miiro Jääskeläinen (Soil Scout Oy) about their advanced and wireless soil monitoring solution (Täysin langaton ja haudattava, erittäin huoltovapaa ja etäluettava maaperän mittausjärjestelmä). Presentations were interesting and participants had questions especially of the application opportunities, and wished for technological demonstrations in the field.
In the end of the program, we also collaborated to grasp ideas for common funding applications, technology demonstration days, and other ideas, wishes and feedback for the Hydro-RDI-Network project. During the event, participants wrote 42 “sticky notes” with theirs ideas to 6 different Google Jamboard pages. This was just a beginning, as the Jamboards were kept for collaborative platform for the next 24 hours to complete, and then we agreed for the next steps in the lead of consortium leader Petteri Alho (University of Turku, Department of Geography and Geology).
According to the discussions in the workshop, it seems the consortium or some of the partners in the consortium will work on to develop at least three funding applications to improve the national hydrological infrastructure, develop new open science practices nationally and internationally, as well as to boost commercialization of new technology and methodology in the hydrological field, which was seen as crucial need especially from the participating companies. Workshop provided us good insight on how to serve our partners better in the autumn and developing our collaboration event further in the future.