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Summary: myself, founder and current communications, dissemination and exploitation officer of the EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies COST action, urgently seeks one additional academic to join the tribunal for his doctoral thesis defense at the University of Almería. Without this confirmation, required by my previous university immediately, the defense cannot proceed, placing my entire academic career, and all ongoing contributions, to this action and other work groups, at severe risk. It also severely endangers the well-being of my loved ones, and my own, as we depend on my salary to make a living. The defense will be conducted online and requires about one hour later this month or early next, all going well, as it should. Please, unsubscribe if not interested in these news.
First, allow me to make an urgent personal appeal before addressing the action’s progress. As I transition to my postdoctoral position at the University of Almería, which also hosts our EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies COST action, we are facing a critical situation regarding my doctoral thesis defense. We urgently need one additional professor to join the thesis tribunal, otherwise the defense cannot be held, and my academic progression will be halted.
The defense will take place online, lasting approximately one hour, later this month or early next. The supervising professor is Adolfo Cangas (click here to email him), my postdoctoral stage research director. If any professor or researcher is able to join as an external tribunal member, please contact him today Friday 10th of October through his University of Almería profile at the following link:
https://brujula.ual.es/authors/131.html
My apologies for having to request this on such short notice. The process has unfortunately been severely disrupted, like much else over an extended period, with little consideration for the work in progress or for the well-being of my loved ones and myself. The confirmation of one more tribunal member is now required immediately by the university. I profoundly regret having to make this appeal under such urgency, yet it is crucial to ensure the continuity of my academic path and my capacity to keep contributing to our common endeavour.
If you can help, or know a professor who could, please contact Professor Adolfo Cangas without delay through his University of Almería profile shared above. Any assistance today would make a decisive difference, and I will remain deeply grateful for your support. Please, I beg you to share with your networks this last minute appeal, as my whole career, tens of years in the making, is now at risk.
Now, to our collective work: the action is moving into its operational phase, with the establishment of our democratic governance and working group coordination systems hosted entirely on our new open-source infrastructure. We are deploying two high-performance servers, each with 32 cores and 126 GB of RAM, that sustain our own collaboration suite. The video above can also be found on our Youtube channel, along with several others, recently produced. It is an honor to share our website is receiving a bit more than seven thousand unique visitors per month already. Our publication has more than half thousand subscribed readers, and our Youtube channel keeps on growing over twenty thousand subscribers. A complete media kit and revamp of our website is underway, announced this Sunday night:
The action’s servers already host BigBlueButton (BBB) for large-scale videoconferencing, available at tele.health.int.eu.org; Consul Democracy for participatory budgeting and transparent decision-making; and Leantime for project management with calendars, Kanban boards, and Gantt charts. Together they constitute the backbone of our digital governance ecosystem. Growth continues steadily toward the thousands, building a stronger network by the day. Each passing hour new experts join in. A communication campaign is under way. Please help us by sharing the explanatory videos about our action and its goals:
https://www.youtube.com/@onehealthedtech
Our channel gathers nearly twenty thousand subscribers, our website around seven thousand monthly visitors, and the publication over five hundred readers. A complete media kit and the upgraded platform will be launched soon to reinforce outreach. As you know, our mission is to implement open-source tools, open courseware, and new One Health curricula throughout the COST area. This requires cooperation with ministries, universities, schools, teachers, and parents’ associations, forming a large collaborative network. We are also developing new AI-assisted learning and tutoring systems to support education in ethical and transparent ways. All missions, scientific, technological, action-research, or training ones, will be proposed and voted transparently through our governance platform. The emphasis is on maximum efficiency: every euro must strengthen the action, avoiding unnecessary travel and expenses. For the cost of one hotel night, we are sustaining a full infrastructure capable of supporting thousands of participants. This must remain our guiding principle.
Mission calls will include both network-proposed initiatives, addressing identified priorities, and member-proposed projects. Through these we aim to empower early-career researchers and practitioners, while maintaining fairness and accountability.
To all members, your participation and leadership are essential. Please inform me if you wish to lead or join a working group. In the coming weeks, a system will be introduced to record short presentation videos, so each of us can introduce our work, motivations, and objectives, to strengthen mutual knowledge and trust within the network, lifting up the careers of those among us most in need. Additional shared services such as LimeSurvey, GIS, and LibreTranslate will be deployed shortly, along with computing environments for R, C, Python, and Rust, ensuring that all members can access analytical tools at no cost. These environments will also support our first joint publication, the systematic literature review now under preparation.
I apologize for the slow rollout caused by deployment work and thank you all for your patience, support, and commitment. I wish you a great weekend! With gratitude and urgency.
