ConnectEO ran from September 2020 to September 2022 under the European Union's COSME programme. This page explains what the platform had to do, who built it, and why it is still online.
What it had to do
The platform served three audiences at once, and they wanted different things from it. European Earth observation SMEs needed to find the programme, understand whether they qualified and apply. The consortium partners running the programme needed to publish events, calls and deliverables themselves, without a developer in the loop. Economic actors in the two target markets, Australia and Chile, needed a credible shop window onto the European companies taking part.
That shaped the build. The service provider catalogue is a structured content type with faceted search, so a visitor can filter participating SMEs by sector and by country rather than scrolling a list. Events, trade missions and webinars are managed as first-class content with their own organisers, venues and categories, because the programme ran on a calendar. Expressions of interest and mission applications are online forms feeding straight back to the consortium. The whole site is published in English and Spanish, to cover both the consortium and the Chilean market.
Who built it
The platform was designed, developed and operated by Webdesign29, a web agency based in Brest, France. We worked with the consortium throughout the project: EARSC, the European Association for Remote Sensing Companies; Pôle Mer Bretagne Atlantique, one of Europe's leading maritime clusters and, like us, based in Brest; and CTA, the Andalusian technology transfer organisation covering agricultural innovation.
Our involvement did not stop at delivery. We hosted and maintained the platform for the duration of the programme, kept the partners publishing without technical support tickets, and we still host it today.
Why it is still online
The project has ended. Its material has not stopped being useful, and a good deal of it is cited from elsewhere: national agencies, cluster organisations and trade press linked to specific pages here while the programme was running. Taking the site down would break every one of those references and quietly erase the published output of a publicly funded project.
So the pages stay at their original addresses, exactly where they were. Nothing has been rewritten. The forms are no longer monitored and the calls are closed, which the notice at the top of every page says plainly, but the record remains readable.
If you are looking at this because you need a platform of the same kind, whether for a funded programme, a cluster or a public body, that is what we do: our write-up of this project goes into the detail. Bringing a site that has gone offline back to its original addresses is something we also do as a service — récupérer un site internet disparu explains how, and why the addresses matter more than the files.
