Meeting your whole consortium, with which you will work together for the next years, is always an interesting and exciting moment. Who are the others, what are their interests and intentions? Will the group harmonise? Is everybody on it? How to organise the group and the daily work to reach what has been promised and where we are paid for?

The idea of a Kickoff Meeting is to unite the consortium with a shared understanding of what is planned and why, and to make decisions about basic project management and funders´ requirements. Kickoff Meetings occur at the beginning of a project, which is a critical moment in the lifetime of it. Those meetings can contribute significantly to the success or failure of a project by setting course and tone of a project. Thus, it is worth to prepare them well.

The Implementation or Kickoff Meeting, held 13 – 15 March 2019 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was the first project meeting of the P-TRAP consortium after the official start on 1^st of March 2019. Special attention was laid on presenting the administrative requirements and discuss general procedures, e.g. for the submission of deliverables and milestones. By this a basic level of understanding how H2020 MSCA ITN-ETNs are working is given. To ensure sufficient time for those administrative discussions but also for the scientific ones, the meeting was scheduled for 2 ½ days. The participants were asked to prepare a short presentation introducing themselves and their institution so that everybody knows who is who in the consortium, and who doing what. The agenda included also time slots for discussions of the scientific status and preparatory work, required networking and interactions between the groups to ensure an efficient start of the project.

We learned about the companies involved …	… and met enthusiastic colleagues!
Eberhard Janneck (GEOS)	Antonio Delgado (University of Sevilla)
P-TRAP was supported from the beginning of proposal preparation  …	… to create as much impact as possible in the end!
Marcus Kratschke (BayFOR)	Olaf van der Kolk (Aquaminerals)

Next to all project work, informal networking is essential to learn about the people. Together we prepared our own “world menu” P-TRAP dinner during a joined cooking workshop given by Smaak Nederland. The recipes came from all over the world, were easy to prepare and “lekker”!

Some cooking impressions

Introduction to the workshop.	Seems that not all were convinced about preparing their own dinner tonight!
	At the end Thilo as our coordinator was serving a perfect, jointly prepared dinner and after the long working days everyone enjoyed it! We are looking forward to a successful project! The first steps have been made during the meeting!