Making European collaboration greener: The ONE meeting approach

Meeting face to face, delving into different cultural contexts and thereby gaining both a better understanding of each other as well as fostering new partnerships and new ideas is at the heart of European projects. Over the last two years, we have experienced a significant shift in these collaborative experiences, with face-to-face meetings in different cultural settings being postponed or cancelled and uncertainty over whether these meetings could ever take place alternatively. In every crisis, however, there is an opportunity – this is also true for European collaboration that must instead manage virtually. In this innovative practice paper, we would like to outline our experiences from a project that aimed to conduct European collaboration within an EU project with ONE meeting only: the ONE Meeting Project (The ONE Meeting Project, 2021). To this end, we have developed a specific approach for going almost exclusively online that is based on sustainability, accessibility and agile project management (Cendon, Kananen, Uotinen, & López-Forés, 2022), using ourselves as the direct actors performing, experiencing and experimenting with it. Making international collaboration greener ranges from less traveling to sustainable travelling, to using technologies efficiently and to strengthening local partnerships. We would like to share what was important for us when following such an approach, what we have learned from our experiences, and what this means for the sustainability of our environment as well as for future methods of employing digital technologies for collaboration and learning.