Proposal concerns the organization of a Launch event of the ESFRI Roadmap 2021 on December 7th 2021 and ESFRI Stakeholder Forum on December 8th in Ljubljana. Both events are a part of the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the EU in second semester of 2021. The Ministry of Education, Science and Sport (MIZS) will organize the events in close cooperation with ESFRI, StR-ESFRI and the EC, including preparation, broad communication about the events and their outputs and related logistical activities such as venue and technical support, dinner, refreshments and social programme as well as press coverage. The main objectives of the launch event of the ESFRI Roadmap 2021 are to make a formal public presentation of the ESFRI Roadmap 2021, to discuss the outcomes and conclusions of the ESFRI 2021 road-mapping exercise with major stakeholders, to reflect on the main challenges for implementation of research infrastructures, to facilitate a quick start towards implementation for new research infrastructures included in the Roadmap, to reflect on possible actions aiming at long-term sustainability of research infrastructures and to prepare solid ground for the planning of the next ESFRI Roadmap update. The main objectives of the ESFRI Stakeholder Forum are to create a structured constructive two-way communication channel with a broad community of the stakeholders, to contribute to better integration of the RIs in the particular communities and to contribute to improved services of the RIs for specific communities. The objectives of both events will be achieved according to the Work plan, which consists of four Work Packages: WP 1 - Project management, WP 2 - Conference content, WP 3 - Conference organisation & management and WP 4 - Communication, Promotion and Dissemination. Expected costs for the project are 99.960,00 EUR and the foreseen duration of the work is 11 months.

The objective of the project »ERA conference« is to create a space for stakeholders to engage with the formation of the new, revitalised European Research Area (ERA) in order to pursue the European Commission's goals of co-designing, co-creating and co-developing ERA policies with all ERA actors. This delivers against the European Commission Communication from September 2020 on A new ERA for Research and Innovation and the Council Conclusions from December 2020 on the New European Research Area. The first day of the ERA conference focuses on the Commission’s proposal for a Council Recommendation on a Pact for Research and Innovation in Europe and the new ERA governance structure. The second day will focus on implementation challenges with stakeholders. The expected impacts of the ERA conference are: a) contributing to the Commission’s co-creation of ERA Actions (derived from the ERA policy agenda), ensuring they are designed appropriately; and b) engaging stakeholders, by giving them their own space to discuss the implementation of several actions. The overall rationale of the ERA conference is based on the high level discussion on the topic of the renewal of the ERA and strengthening relations between stakeholders and the Commission (through workshop activities on the second day of the conference). The ERA conference will also deliver promotional activities prior to the conference – with stakeholder engagement through video testimonials on the topic of the renewal of the ERA, which will be publicised alongside the conference. Additionally, after the conference, the publication of conference recommendations will contribute to the balanced development of the new ERA and could be used in further ministerial discussions on the renewal of ERA. In the time of proposal writing it is planned for the conference to be held live, however we also have a support plan in case we would have to switch to online event due to the pandemics.

The conference will aim to strengthen the impact of the MSCA programme in achieving the goals of the New ERA and will address the unbalanced mobility flows that still represents a major challenge for Member States and contributes to the research and innovation divide within the EU. Return migration and reintegration processes of MSCA researchers after the end of their project to the countries of origin will be the main topic of the conference. At the conference, we will discuss and elaborate the multidimensional MSCA talents mobility flows among various MSCA stakeholders, including researchers. We will focus on the diversity of mobility flows and the different aspects and effects of MSCA return mobility and reintegration processes in countries of origin to achieve well-balanced mobility flows. The first objective is to raise awareness of the importance of return mobility and reintegration processes in order to strengthen the balanced mobility flows of MSCA researchers. The second objective is to show the examples of existing good practices as well as barriers, instruments, and policies to promote the return migration and reintegration processes of MSCA fellows after the end of their project. The conference will be a venue for MSCA researchers and stakeholders to share, discuss and elaborate on their experiences, challenges and proposals. The third objective is to provide recommendations for the implementation of MSCA return migration and reintegration tools and policies at EU, Member State, research organisation and individual levels. In line with the conference programme, our discussions will focus on the importance of additional measures taken by Member States to create targeted training and career opportunities for researchers, to improve working conditions and the working environment, to support investment in human capital, scientific and technological infrastructures to attract researchers back after their fellowships.

The proposal X5gon stands for easily implemented freely available innovative technology elements converging currently scattered Open Educational Resources (OER) available in various modalities across Europe and the globe. X5gon combines content understanding, user modelling quality assurance methods and tools to boost a homogenous network of (OER) sites and provides users (teachers, learners) with a common learning experience. X5gon deploys open technologies for recommendation, learning analytics and learning personalisation services that works across various OER sites, independent of languages, modalities, scientific domains, and socio-cultural contexts. It develops services OER media convergence including full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, videos, tests, software, related events, tools, materials, techniques used to support access to knowledge. Fivefold solutions are offered to OER sites: • Cross-modal: technologies for multimodal content understanding; • Cross-site: technologies to transparently accompany and analyse users across sites; • Cross-domain: technologies for cross domain content analytics; • Cross-language: technologies for cross lingual content recommendation; • Cross-cultural: technologies for cross cultural learning personalisation. X5gon collects and index OER resources, track data of users progress and feed an analytics engine driven by state-of-the-art machine learning, improve recommendations via user understanding and match with knowledge resources of all types. The project will create three services X5oerfeed, X5analytics and X5recommend and run a series of pilot case studies that enable the measurement of the broader goals of delivering a useful and enjoyable educational experience to learners in different domains, at different levels and from different cultures. Two exploitation scenarios are planned: (i) free use of services for OER, (ii) commercial exploitation of the multimodal, big data, real-time analytics pipeline.