It is common sense that countering disinformation in all its shapes is most effective with united forces. While for journalists and fact-checkers this is expressed in collaboratively verifying content, on a project level networking and exchanging ideas across projects to find and effectively use synergies is essential. Therefore, it is one designated aim of vera.ai to create a network of related EU-funded projects and beyond.
With its 14 project partners vera.ai builds upon a promising basis for a wide network. Partners are not just located all over Europe – from the UK to Greece, from the Netherlands to Slovakia – but also bring along great experiences and potential clustering partners from former and ongoing Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and other related projects.
Efforts in this regard already started at the very beginning of vera.ai’s launch and will be ongoing throughout the projects lifetime:
It was the TITAN project that had a guest appearance at vera.ai’s physical kick-off meeting in September 2022. To keep exchange between both projects going, vera.ai’s project coordinator Symeon Papdopoulos, in return, presented and discussed aims and approaches to the TITAN consortium and the EU project officer Peter Friess. While vera.ai focusses primarily on services for professionals, TITAN concentrates on AI-powered services and solutions targeting citizens. Thus, both projects are highly relevant to target the issue of disinformation from various angles.
Furthermore, consortium member ATC introduced vera.ai at the kick-off meetings of the GADMO and MedDMO hubs as well as within EDMO training sessions. To find out more about the important collaboration with the European Digital Media Observatory and its EDMO hubs it is recommend to check out the article “EDMO, the EDMO Hubs and vera.ai: united against disinformation” which outlines the connection between vera.ai, its partners as well as individuals in greater detail.
Then, there are a number of connections between vera.ai partners and other projects because of cross-project involvement (for details see also the section “Related Projects” here on our website.) Numerous connections already exist, more is foreseen as the project and work progress.
The vera.ai consortium is eager to further expand its network and to collaborate with respective projects and organisations to reach the best outcome for both the project itself as well as the targeted communities such as journalists, fact-checkers, researchers and society as a whole.
If you, dear reader of this article, are involved in a project or activity which you think is suited for collaboration or exchange, please do not hesitate to get in touch. This is best done via the vera.ai coordinators Symeon Papdopoulos {papadop (at) iti (dot) gr} and Olga Papadopoulou {olgapapa (at) iti (dot) gr}.
Author: Anna Schild (DW)
Editor: Jochen Spangenberg (DW)