On March 19, 2024, the regular meeting of the SmartCityTech Partnership (https://www.smartcitytech.eu/home) was held in Antwerp, Belgium with the participation of the Cluster Sofia Knowledge City. Representatives of the partners from Aalborg Green Hub, Denmark, GAIA Spain, AMEC Spain, Bayern Innovative Germany, Tice Portugal, as well as representatives of the hosts from Antwerp were present. The newest member of this partnership, the SCIC association from Finland also participated remotely.

From the cluster the persons that took part were Dimitar Filipov, member of the Board and Deputy Chairman of SmartCityTech Partnership, Vihra Andonova, Chairman of the Control Board and Krum Dimitrov, marketing and digitization intern at the cluster. The meeting was about discussing and choosing a project under the Interreg program where the partnership would participate. The choice of venue and time coincided with the Xth Conference of the European Interreg Program as well as the opening of the 3rd (last) call for projects for the current program period. At the meeting, Vihra Andonova, a specialist with long experience in Interreg projects, was listened to with great interest. After extensive discussion, it was decided that the project would be in the SMART domain, possibly with the participation of GREEN elements, due to the nature of the expertise of the participants in the partnership.

It was found that in order to fulfill the conditions for participation in such a project, the partnership needs to attract partners from France, as well as one of the new members of Interreg - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, Moldova and Ukraine. The partners undertook to conduct a survey to attract such new members to the SmartCityTech Partnership. After discussion, it was decided that the topic of the project should be in the direction of policy making in the use of Big Data to intorduce smart solutions in the management of smart cities.