Support to education, and generally to knowledge brokerage, is fundamental for the Blue Growth strategy, especially in view of creating a ‘knowledge alliance’. World-renowned leading research institutes (e.g. ICES, IRD, FAO,) as well as Universities (e.g. Sorbonne University and University of Kiel) organise courses, workshop and hands-on meetings on topics related to the marine domain. The aim is to help scientists, at various stages of their careers, in acquiring necessary competences on topics related to stock assessment, oceanography and ecosystem approach to fisheries. Blue Skills aims at supporting these activities, complementing the other objectives of this proposal, by supporting knowledge competence. It will implement a continuous spiral of competence growing that will involve (i) scientists operating on marine related and biological conservation topics (e.g. stock assessment), (ii) scientists presenting their models at workshops and at hands-on meetings, (iii) scholars that intend to broaden their knowledge on marine conservation, (iv) students in the marine and oceanographic domain.

In this scenario, BlueBRIDGE will build tools to address knowledge brokerage in a cost effective way. In particular, it will provide services compliant with new Science 2.0 suggestions. These services, focusing on vessels activity monitoring, fisheries managements, biodiversity conservation, taxonomic studies and oceanography, will provide transparent access to heterogeneous datasets and to a variety of computational intensive models. Simple graphical user interfaces will transparently manage several programming languages and cloud computations. The services will also support and promote social networking, where scientists and students can communicate and exchange opinions, models, datasets and results about their research. BlueBRIDGE will develop services to be used by ICES, IRD, FAO and other academic institutions in training courses and workshops.