The first half of our 3-year project has passed. So, it was time to come together as a consortium, share our progress and discuss the next steps.

Hosted by Marko Grobelnik and his team, we met at Jozef Stefan Institute’s partner organization, the Center for Advanced Academic Studies, in beautiful Dubrovnik. After an opening keynote by Prof. Marko Tadić who is a linguist at the University of Zagreb, we updated each other on the status of the TWON and decided to build a demonstrator – the Twonny! The Twonny will help us to communicate the results and insights of our complex research project ot a wider public. Apart from that we discussed the design of our case studies with Robert Koch Institute (RKI) and Slovenska tiskovna agencija (STA) and planned our work in the coming months.

The last day was kicked off with a workshop by the FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik on stakeholders and policy recommendations. The advisory board member Judith Peterka delivered an input and the team worked on policy recommendations, that participants of DialoguePerspectives’ TWON Citizen Lab had drafted. The day ended with a hackathon to find and fix bugs together.

Of course, we also enjoyed the sea, went for a swim and had excellent Croatian seafood – and took the opportunity to grow together as a team and recharge our batteries for the work ahead.