A successful GÉANT Information Day was held on 5th April 2018 in the capital of Albania, Tirana in partnership with the Albanian NREN RASH. More than 100 participants from the Albanian Research and Education (R&E) community attended with representatives from many universities both public and private. Additionally, we welcomed senior representatives from the region including from Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia and Croatia.
The event was organised in response to the interest from the Albanian R&E community to highlight what GÉANT can offer, how they can participate in the GÉANT project and how new collaborations can be developed.
Annabel Grant (Senior Stakeholder Engagement Manager, GÉANT) explains further:
“The overall aim of the event was to demonstrate the benefits of NRENs and GÉANT to RASH’s funders and wider community and raise the profile of R&E networking and GÉANT in the wider region.”
The opening was inaugurated by Ervin Demo (Deputy Minister, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports), Arjan Xhelaj (Director, RASH) and Erik Huizer (CEO, GÉANT). This was followed by sessions focused on how GÉANT and NRENs can collaborate in the future and was reflected in the discussion topics around Scientific Research, Education (Schools) and Community. Benefits of the GÉANT project, Cloud Services and Trust, Identity and Security Services for RASH and their R&E community were brought up in the afternoon at various site meetings.
The event kick-started discussions on new opportunities for regional collaboration and signals a very promising start of more regional work, service sharing and GÉANT service take-up.
This event was the first in several which will be held in the region. The next opportunity for regional networking and collaboration will be the GÉANT Information Day held on the 6th of June 2018 in Skopje, Macedonia, hosted by MARnet, preceding TNC18 in Trondheim.
