A Flanders meeting for the BLING project
On the 29th of March, the aldermen of the city of Roeselare in Belgium welcomed us. Roeselare is known for its food, cycling, shopping and digital innovation. Mr. Matthijs Samyn was eager to learn more about the BLING project’s use cases. All partners were excited to meet again, so we had lots of room for discussions during the meeting and this shows the advantage of a real life partner meeting. Then we have so much more room for interaction, feedback and discussion.
This was especially visible on the second day of our visit. During the workshop on lessons learned, deliverables and communications, partners were discussing on what they have learned and how we can get the best results out for our audiences. We collected all of our findings on large sheets and we will use those for creating very valuable lessons for our stakeholders.
Although this meeting was mainly focusing on meeting each other, brainstorming together and looking into the remaining 12 months of the project, there was also room for presentations of some experts. Professor Lode Lauwaert from the Philosophy department of the KU Leuven presented his work on Ethics and Technology and how new technologies could be disruptive for society because they are causing new issues we have to deal with. The third day of our Flanders meeting, we travelled to Bruges where we were welcomed by the University of Applied Sciences of HOWEST. During this last day business expert Cyril Vanneste of the company IntellectEU presented how gamification can help the adoption of public Distributed Ledger Technologies.
All in all, we are looking back at very fruitful and insightful days in Flanders. A big thank you for our two partners who did all the organizing work: the city of Roeselare and the University of HOWEST.