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The official Kick-off Meeting (KoM) was held on November 3rd and 4th, 2020. EIFER, the project coordinator organised it virtually via Zoom Meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to extensive participation of the involved 53 partners, the event gathered distinguished individuals such as Jens Bartholmes, Policy Officer at the European Commission. City representatives of Turku and Dijon were represented by welcome message videos, previously collected from them as part of the preparation process.

The first day of the KoM mainly focused on the cities and their integrated solutions, followed by WP leaders’ presentations which were held on the second day. The content of presentations included description of tasks, deliverables, and upcoming actions of the respective WPs. In order to facilitate discussions, a Q&A session was organised after each presentation and the questions were facilitated only via the chat box. This helped to spark useful discussions leading to significant conclusions.

It is relevant to also note that as a side activity, 30 second video clips were collected from all partners prior to the kick-off, to be played during the meeting as due to the size of the consortium and the virtual meeting set up, it would be complicated to have a classic round table for a consortium of 53 partners. The clips were then grouped by ecosystem and played after the presentations, in order to enable the participants to get acquainted with the representatives involved in different parts of the project. A snapshot of such a video is presented below.