Eight study visits, nine online interviews, three answered questionnaires and hundreds of pages of desk research were organised, visited, asked and read by the SimpliVi partners. Many European and some third countries as well as European organisations supported the SimpliVi project by sharing their knowledge and experience with judicial videoconferencing. Practitioners from these institutions invested their precious time to coordination nationally and prepare the answers to the long list of SimpliVi questions. To support the preparation, SimpliVi provided an interview script with possible questions to all interviewees. Read more about the interview script and where and how it was applied in our Story #06: Online Interviews. Each study visit and online interview resulted in a document of about 15 pages of input. Some even significantly more.

We would once again like to thank all interviewees for their time, preparation and constructive discussion during the study visits and interviews and with the questionnaires!

The final goal was to produce the Deliverables, above all the SimpliVi Recommendations & Best Practises. But how can we extract and distil the most essential information out of this mountain of information?

It became clear after the first study visits and online interview that it is impossible to process and analyse all input at once and go directly from the raw data to the Deliverable. Thus, a staged approach would be necessary to consolidate the data in several iterations until the most relevant data prevails.

First stage

At first, it was necessary to summarise each input as soon as it was analysed. By doing so, the memory of the raw input and the relevance and priority of each input by the interviewee was still fresh. The analysing SimpliVi partner would produce a summary and add short conclusions of what was seen, heard and read. The summary was then shared with the other SimpliVi partners either in written format or by presenting it during dedicated sessions. With this approach, all SimpliVi partners were aware of the relevant knowledge gain, where to find more details about it and which partner was most proficient for that specific input.

Second stage

Even though the summaries of each artefact (study visit, interview, questionnaire, desk research) were a prolific baseline the amount of data was still too much to go directly to the Deliverables. A second stage was therefore established to further distil the information. The main artefact of this stage was the "Consolidation Document". The document itself was technically not a Deliverable but it was internally treated as such. While drafting the document structure and the content, the project partners put as much diligence and review cycles into it as with every other Deliverable.

First, the document structure was established. The most important chapter 3 is about the results and key findings of the input gathering phase before. The chapter summarises drivers, key success factors, barriers, impacts and additional aspects to cross-border videoconferencing. A chapter 4 dedicated to implications for cross-border videoconferencing pushes the cross-border aspect of videoconferencing even further. The annex of this Consolidation Document contains all summaries and conclusions of study visits, interview and questionnaires.

Second, the structure was complemented with content, by going - mainly - through the individual summaries. The summaries were analysed and the findings were extracted and assigned to the relevant chapters 3 and 4. After an initial draft of the document the partners applied several iterations to review and improve the Consolidation Document. The final result of the document is now available and can be downloaded with the link below. It is, however, a living document and could be amended in the future.

Third stage

The Consolidation Document is the summary of the gathering of all input. The final stage is now to draft the various SimpliVi Deliverables on this basis. Each Deliverable has a specific purpose and perspective. The D2.1 SimpliVi Recommendations & Best Practises focusses on the learnings from other institutions and ideas for improvement based on these learnings. The D2.2 Business Workflow and the subsequent D3.2 e-CODEX Implementation take the perspective of communicating between the participants of a judicial cross-border videoconference. D2.3 Requirements for adapting European Court Databases benefits again from the learnings from other institutions and will focus on recommendations how the European Court Databases can support a more efficient videoconferencing communication.

All these Deliverables are currently being drafted. They will initially be presented at the SimpliVi Conference. Once available, the public Deliverables will be available at the Deliverables & Milestones page of this website. 

Make sure to come back and read about the final output of the project!