PRO-Ethics produced a total of 39 deliverables in the context of eight work packages. It organised 25 planned events with external stakeholders and 8 internal events, on top of numerous additional workshops and other event contributions.
In WP8, procedures for ethics committee approvals, recruitment of participants, and informed consent were broadly defined. Knowledge management, open access and data management were also addressed in this context, and further explored in WP7, where quality assurance procedures were also laid out in detail.
In WP1, the theoretical foundations of the project were laid, focusing on the legal and regulatory frameworks European RFOs operate in and outlining different approaches to the ethics in and of participation, concluding with the development of a Draft Ethics Framework and Guidelines, to support the design and evaluation of ethically sound participatory RFO activities. WP2 oversaw the development and implementation of participatory pilots in two phases, informing the development of the Draft Framework, followed by its testing and validation in second phase. WP2 also provided training, capacity building and support to pilot partners and saw the collaboration with outside RFO actors. WP3 entailed the collaborative development of a reporting and assessment tool for RFO partners, the cross-pilot learning efforts, and the collection of narrative “pilot stories”, which served as a tool for reflection and discussion. An IT tool was identified to facilitate participatory activities in the pilots and an e-consultation on the Ethics Framework and Guidelines. WP3 also analysed, evaluated and synthesised the pilot experiences.
WP4 identified relevant stakeholders and organised stakeholder engagement workshops with different target groups, as well as dialogue events with research ethics committees and integrity bodies. Towards the end of the project, 14 national and regional embedding events were implemented by various partners to share the ethics framework in partner countries’ ecosystems. The stakeholders collected for the mapping also supported the communication, dissemination and exploitation (CDE) efforts of WP6. WP5 directly continued the work of WP1 and synthesised the inputs of WP2, WP3 and WP4 to develop a final version of the Ethics Framework and Guidelines. A booklet version of these documents was also developed. This overall feedback process was supported by the development of a concept to properly monitor and evaluate the participatory activities of the project. In WP6, the project identity was developed, a website and social media presence were established, and an accessible project flyer and poster were designed. An animated video, two project films, 4 policy briefs, ten newsletters, and 45 blogposts were released. While the consortium partners served as multipliers for the PRO-Ethics social media accounts, they also organised and participated in various conferences, workshops and other events to raise the profile of the project. A final conference was organised in collaboration with the COESO project and found a live audience of 170 participants from all key stakeholder communities.
