Agora Stakeholder Forum

On June 26, the KIT Library, in collaboration with the International Department, hosted the so-called Agora Stakeholder Forum at the Visiting Scholars’ House. The background for this course is the participation of both business units in the international collaborative project aUPaEU (A University Partnership for Acceleration of European Universities), which is funded by the European Commission.

The target of the aUPaEU project is to support European university alliances in their digital transformation, particularly with regard to the development of shared digital platforms for research, mobility, and collaboration. The digital open-source platform Agora—essentially the core product of aUPaEU—is currently being developed for nearly two dozen European university alliances and is therefore attracting increasing attention within the European Research Area.

The Agora Stakeholder Forum focused on exchange and listening: About 15 representatives from a good dozen international university alliances across several countries took the opportunity to share their experiences with the Agora platform, discuss challenges and success stories, and provide feedback and suggestions for improvement to aUPaEU. In addition to substantive discussions, special weighting was placed on “community building.”

Amid midsummer temperatures, the KIT organizing team—in addition to providing targeted insights on topics such as Open Science and knowledge transfer—made sure to keep a cool head at all times. The KIT Library would like to extend its heartfelt thanks to all participants, the project partners from aUPaEU, and our colleagues from International Affairs (Business Unit) for their enthusiastic attendance, the inspiring discussions, and the collegial collaboration. We would also like to thank the team at the Guest Lecturer House for their wonderful support. 

We are already looking forward to the next edition of the Agora Stakeholder Forum!