Minutes of the first MaMLiSE TPM
The Transnational Kick-off Meeting (TPM1) was held on the 4th and 11th of December 2020. It was organized, due to Covid-19 restrictions, online by Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland via Google Meets and Zoom. 24 participants took part in the meeting.
The goals of the meeting:
- familiarizing with the details of the project and its objectives
- establishing rules, procedures, guidelines, schedules, communication channels; coordination and production of intellectual outputs
- detailed planning of the short-term training in Bielefeld, Germany (March 2021)
- arranging the newsletter schedule
- formulating Dissemination Strategy and Quality Assurance Strategy
- appointing Steering Committee, Quality Assurance Officers, Output Leaders and teams responsible for the intellectual outputs’ development and newsletter preparation
- identifying misunderstandings in order to introduce flexible solutions and managing conflict of the contentious issues
- team-building (to enhance partnership)
The first day – 4th of December 2020
At the beginning of the first day and after short welcome from AMU team all partner teams presented themselves, especially their expertise areas. The entire project team is 34 persons.
Subsequently, the project coordinator, Anna Szczepaniak-Kozak, delivered a PowerPoint presentation about the project’s general concept, tasks, outputs and events.
Later on, important dates, events, project milestones as well as the project action plan were brought to the partners’ attention. They were informed about April 2022 and May 2023 being critical moments in the project’s operation and asked to put aside extra working time for these periods.
Then discussion and questions around the project’s logics and the presentations delivered followed.
In the next part, members of the AMU team presented the project’s management guidelines, whose foundation was drafted in the project proposal.
Afterwards, a discussion and questions around the presentation followed. All the information provided at this stage of the TPM is also included in the Project Management Guide, which was also shared with the partners.
In the next step, the Steering Committee, Quality Assurance Officers, Output Leaders and teams responsible for the intellectual outputs development and newsletters were nominated.
After lunch break, the meeting focused on Intellectual output one (IO1). In particular, the partners concentrated on establishing rules, procedures, guidelines, schedules, communication channels as well as coordination and production of this output. A preliminary scheme for the output was created but the partners decided that the matter needed more attention and decided to schedule an additional meeting to discuss the realisation of IO1 (on 29th of January 2021).
At the end of the first day, the partners discussed the short-term training in Bielefeld. Due to the pandemic and resulting international travel restrictions, the consortium was hesitant to approve of the originally planned dates for this training. It was planned to stage the meeting in March, 2021 but the partners decided that most probably it would not be possible to hold it in person then. The dates for the short-term training will be discussed further during the additional online meeting on the 29th of January 2021.
The second day – 11th of December 2020
The second day started with a short summary of the first day. Special heed was paid to organisational matters concerning IO1, the working meeting of the Steering Committee and the Quality Board (29th of January 2021), the second TPM and the Bielefeld short-term training.
Subsequently, Anna Szczepaniak-Kozak presented the most important budgetary issues related to the project realisation and the articles of the partnership agreement. She drew the partners’ attention to the project grant agreement, especially the annexes to this document, including Annex III of the Grant Agreement.
Then she went on to discuss the process of reporting in the project. The partners were informed about the dates for reporting which NA lists in the Grant agreement and dates for document submission.
The reporting schedule is:
reporting deadline for activities carried out between / type of report
10/07/2021 01.11.2020 – 30.06.2021 / progress report
10.04.2022 01.11.2020 – 31.03.2022 / interim report
31.08.2022 01.11.2020 – 31.07.2023 (the entire project period) / final report, 10.09.2023 for CTI
Also the first draft of the timesheet for IO development has been discussed by the partners.
In the next part, Emilia Wąsikiewicz-Firlej presented the dissemination policy which the consortium plans to adopt, including cooperation with associated partners.
The project’s website: http://mamlise.amu.edu.pl/ as well as project dissemination/visibility elements (logo, PPP layout, letterhead paper, etc) were also presented to the partners at this point of the meeting. The partners were also reminded about the necessity to use the Erasmus + emblem and to give credit to the EU funding when presenting the project to the general public.
Later on, Anna Berezowska introduced the topic of the newsletter schedule (AMU), a partner responsible for EPALE and e-Twinning accounts (ODN kindly agreed to take over this role), jointly with rules for the moderation of the project’s Facebook account (AMU in cooperation with University of Bremen and CTI): https://www.facebook.com/mamliseproject.
The AMU team informed the partners that the Facebook account and the project’s webpage were planned to be launched in January 2021.
It was established that the Dissemination Strategy would be fine-tuned on a regular basis by the University of Bremen, and the Quality Assurance Strategy by the Quality Board.
After the lunch break, Intellectual output two was discussed, especially establishing rules, procedures, guidelines, schedules, communication channels; coordination and production of this output.
The last item on the agenda was the matter of the identification of misunderstandings among partners in order to introduce flexible solutions and managing conflict situations. The role of internal monitoring and evaluation (coordinated by the University of Limerick) was highlighted in this area. The partners established that they would be working towards common goals, listed in the project proposal, following the principles of sincere cooperation, transparency and openness. On this positive note the meeting was brought to an end.
The next working meeting was scheduled on the 12th and 19th of March 2021. The meeting will be online.
These minutes were taken by
Anna Berezowska and Anna Szczepaniak-Kozak