Start up for Development

The project Start up for Development(START UP) is focusing on the concept of smart cities/villages and the understanding of this concept by the municipalities who are the ones implementing smart solutions in their environment. It is based on a premise that the understanding of the concept of smart cities/villages by municipalities is on a low level due to the fact that the problem is too wide, solutions even wider and there is also the lack of experts offering comprehensive solutions for municipalities. Especially those small municipalities that can not afford to have such experts in their employment.Based on the project's goal above is to prepare a course for trainers who will be able to give municipalities a clear and comprehensive explanation of what smart cities/villages would mean in their specific environment. Moreover they will be also able to give a training to other trainers and thus contribute to further dissemination of project results. To achieve this goal a set of intellectual outputswill be achieved during the project period. It will start with the survey of needs of municipalities and trainers. Following will be the curriculum development. Next it is course materials development and an organisation of a webinar for training of trainers. Once all the materials of the course are finalised they will be internationalised, i.e. translated to local languages of the consortium. All the project'scourse materials will be freely available in the form of Moodle course also after the end of the project. In order to even more strengthen the outcomes of the project its last part will be dedicated to organising international conferences in all the partner countries of the project.The project's consortium consists of five partners from Spain, Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria and Greece.The main target group of the project will be represented by adult educators who will be trained also during the project lifetime. Final beneficiaries can be defined as adult educators for whom there will be an online course freely available, representatives of municipalities who will benefit from betterunderstanding of smart cities/villages concept and finally general public that will directly benefit from smart solutions in their municipalities. The project will last for 30 months and its working language will be English.