EU BEACON and Youth Digital mental health mapping and literature review skilling up workshops and publications
Today session postponed to early October; all work ongoing, further news soon
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Summary: today’s workshop on literature review and visualization, focused on publication retrieval, entity extraction, and social-semantic network mapping, will be postponed. I must prioritize the final stages of my doctoral dissertation and parallel responsibilities in Indonesia, while also advancing the launch of EU COST BEACON. Interim updates will be shared in September, beginning with a post detailing how to use a simple Python script with main scientific repositories for automated literature retrieval. The full workshops are rescheduled for October and November. Protocols for Youth Digital Mental Health and EU COST BEACON One Health Education via Digital Technologies will be submitted to Open Research Europe before then. All work is set to be completed on time before the year ends, as scheduled.
I must inform you that today’s workshop on literature review and visualization, our initial session on paper and book chapter retrieval, entity extraction, and the construction of interactive social-semantic networks analyzing relations while mapping authors, topics, institutions, and publications, scheduled a few months ago, will be postponed until next month. The new date will be polled as soon as possible.
I sincerely apologize to the members of the Youth Digital Mental Health action and to colleagues within EU COST BEACON One Health Education via Digital Technologies who signed up, and all of you receiving this email. Both initiatives rely on my contributions to advance the mappings and reviews scheduled for completion before the end of this year. With this message, I reassure all work is to be completed on time before the year ends, as planned. The primary reason for the postponement is the necessity to prioritize other pressing commitments: these include my ongoing responsibilities as a medical anthropologist currently based in Indonesia, engaged in action research for the abolition of pasung, a still widespread form of domestico-medical severe mistreatment in Indonesia, as well as the completion of my doctoral dissertation, which I am due to defend in the coming weeks.
In parallel, I am dedicating substantial efforts to the expansion and launch event of EU COST BEACON and to the establishment of the software infrastructure required for its optimal operation. In my capacity as action founder and currently scientific communications, dissemination, and exploitation officer, it is my duty to ensure that our actions grows stronger into a robust excellence network numbering several thousand members by the time of the official launch event next month, as an elite devoted community capable and fully engaged in achieving all objectives within the designated timeframe. This undertaking includes not only the consolidation of technical expertise and the cultivation of durable partnerships with allied initiatives such as Youth Digital Mental Health, but also the design and deployment of a pan-European media campaign to guarantee broad visibility and recognition of our work.
EU BEACON is being built on a fully open-source infrastructure, designed to enable all members to collaborate effectively under the highest open science and data standards. For videoconferencing we are adopting BigBlueButton (BBB), the platform France has deployed nationwide across its schools, due to its educational features, transparency, and scalability. Project management will run on LeanTime, whose flexible and visually structured design makes it particularly suitable for neurodiverse collectives, helping participants to focus, plan, and contribute with ease. For governance, we are implementing Consul Democracy, the leading open-source framework for ethical, transparent, and participatory decision-making. It will allow us to deliberate proposals, debate online, vote on budgets, and collectively select the most effective strategies to meet our objectives. We are engaging the open source developer communities, along with computer scientists, health science specialists, social scientist and pedagogists, as well as biologists, cognitive scientists, economists, administrators, governors, and all relevant experts. As you know, EU BEACON is set to become a flagship initiative for one health education and digital innovation, positioning itself at the forefront of transdisciplinary collaboration, open science, and impactful knowledge dissemination across Europe and beyond.
The deployment of the needed tools and more skilling up sessions will follow, as the infrastructure is progressively readied. Presentation sessions to new and current members will soon be shared, as well as media sessions with outlets and science popularizers across the EU and COST areas. We are working hard on our outreach, currently expanding to tens of thousands, employing the same computational and analytical techniques that underpin the mapping and literature research exercises. All materials will be disseminated in due course.
My proposal is therefore to defer today’s workshop until next month and the next, and instead provide a series of interim updates in written form, to be shared over the coming weeks. Those posts will include preparatory material relevant to the workshops planned for October and November. Participants will need both Python and R installed in order to follow the exercises. The first installment will feature a simple script for retrieving publications by keyword from major academic databases and extracting their metadata. I expect to make this available, together with a code repository, by the end of September. By that time, both our mapping and literature review protocols, Youth Digital Mental Health and EU COST BEACON, will also have been submitted to Open Research Europe -as the documents are already ready-, potentially along a white paper on the technology stack to be used.
Please make sure that Python and R are installed in advance in your computer, should you wish to follow the upcoming posts and workshops. These sessions will demonstrate how to process entire collections of sources at once, enabling semi-automated workflows that can compress tasks otherwise requiring weeks or months into a matter of hours. The goal is to equip participants with practical tools for large-scale literature retrieval, entity extraction, and network analysis, thereby accelerating the production of robust, evidence-based reviews and mappings. I regret the delay and thank you for your understanding.