D.4.4: Plan for continuation of the knowledge platform

Summary

This deliverable is part work package 4 of the OK-Net Arable Horizon 2020 project, which started on 1 March 2015 and finished on 28 February 2018. The aim of OK-Net Arable is to promote and exchange knowledge among farmers, farm advisers and scientists with the objective to increase productivity and quality in organic arable cropping all over Europe. Within the 3-year project, a knowledge platform was created (farmknowledge.org) to provide access to a wide range of tools and resources, that can help to improve organic production. While, the platform was launched in October 2016, it was platform was continuously improved during the course of the project and tools were added until the end of the project. Setting up the farmknowledge platform was a success. After a slow start, the visitor numbers have been continuously increasing since September 2017, and with a new Facebook group and twitter account it will be more popularised and well-known, which will continue increase the number of visitors. The work that has been done will not be lost. In the project application of OK-Net Arable, some partners already agreed to continue the platform for at least 5 years after the end of the project, namely: IFOAM EU, AU/ICROFS, FiBL, PFT Ltd/ORC, Bioland, AIAB and IAMB. These partners have now agreed on the following steps to continue the platform:
• Continuation under OK-Net EcoFeed
• Using farmknowledge.org as dissemination platform for other projects
• Strengthening link with Organic Eprints
• Improvement of the functioning of farmknowledge.org
By implementing those 4 steps, we want the farmknowledge platform to be a reference knowledge hub for practical information on organic farming at EU-level, from all kinds of projects, not only Horizon 2020. We will also explore how to open the platform and give the possibility to new "core partners" to join the initiative, to use the platform and support it. This deliverable contains the analysis of the visitor’s statistics of the OK-Net Platform (famknowledge.org), such as how many users the platform had, how much time did they spent on the platform and how many pageviews were registered in the different month. The report includes also the description of the “Recommended tool of the week” and how it has affected the numbers of visitors. End-users experiences with using the platform and a comparison with other platforms are also included. The deliverable ends with a plan for the continuation of the platform.