EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies: operational readiness status, further governance reinforcement, current institutional expansion across the full COST area, and media outreach
Building the open technological and educational infrastructure for over half hundred countries, delivering transparent governance, sustainable research ecosystems, and equitable learning access
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Executive summary: this weekend, the EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies action activates its full governance infrastructure and launches open access to Leantime, the Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform, and the rest of infrastructure. Together, these systems will secure transparent decision-making, democratic budgeting, and complete oversight of all operations. If you wish to stop receiving updates, please unsubscribe via your membership form or notify us directly. The next post will be released on Sunday night, 26 October, with confirmation that all systems are online and operational, listing in full all infrastructure components ready.
The action network, already over half thousands members strong, is now expanding to become a coordinated excellence framework linking universities, research institutes, agencies, enterprises, and civil society across the entire COST area and cooperating regions. The action stands as the central educational implementation of the European and global one health framework, connecting open science, open technology, and participatory governance to reform education systems and create sustainable opportunities that benefit all, particularly the most in need.
It is growing to connect universities, research institutes, government administrations, enterprises, and civil society in a balanced, interdisciplinary ecosystem integrating medicine, veterinary sciences, public health, computer science, engineering, law, anthropology, sociology, economics, pedagogy, policy, and ethics. COST funds these networks through the Horizon Europe framework under the oversight of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation. Evaluation and selection are performed by independent experts to guarantee transparency, accountability, and scientific excellence. Within this framework operates EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies, a major pan-European initiative involving national ministries, regional governments, and international agencies in coordinated reform. Our action is one of the few ongoing comprehensive efforts addressing full educational transformation through one health integration and open technological means, an essential, urgent, and paramount contribution to the structural improvement of Europe’s research, education, and health systems.
As of 2025, the COST Association finances and coordinates networking activities across forty-five full member states, one cooperating member, one partner member, and nine Near Neighbour Countries, forming an extended scientific and educational cooperation zone of fifty-six participating nations. The framework encompasses the entire European Union and its associated states, including the United Kingdom, Türkiye, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and all Western Balkan and Eastern Partnership nations, with Israel as the cooperating member and South Africa as partner. Near Neighbour participation extends the network to North Africa and the Middle East, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, and Tunisia, while Ukraine retains a dual status as both member and neighbour under transitional arrangements. Collectively these countries represent 1.18 billion people, of whom 450.4 million reside within the European Union. Their aggregated institutional capacity, built under the Horizon Europe Framework and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, makes COST the largest coordinated structure for open research and education in existence.
Within this area, and globally, the need for comprehensive one health education has become structurally urgent. Ecological instability, accelerating zoonotic risk, environmental degradation, and social and economic fragmentation now converge into a single systemic vulnerability that demands a scientifically literate, operationally prepared, and ethically grounded population. The problem is perennial with humanity. Civilizations have repeatedly risen and fallen through the same pattern of ignorance, division, and disregard for interdependence. Every major religion and ethical system, from early scripts to contemporary teachings, calls humanity to respect one another, to safeguard life, and to act as responsible stewards of the natural world. Yet these imperatives remain unfulfilled without the scientific and technological means to translate them into coordinated global action. Only through education rooted in evidence and compassion can the divides between belief, culture, and policy be bridged. Science and technology are not in opposition to moral duty but its necessary instruments, providing the shared framework for truth, understanding, and peace that every civilization has sought.
The EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies action responds directly to this condition. It is mandated to set the ground for further coordination by creating a solid excellence network, uplift the careers of all members -specially the most in need-, develop the educational, digital, and governance systems required to convert awareness into competence and competence into collective capability, and achieve its successful implementation. The initiative establishes the curricular and infrastructural backbone linking biomedical, environmental, computational, and social knowledge through open access, open science, and transparent governance. Its purpose is systemic readiness: to ensure that the entire COST area and its partners, and ultimately the global community, can meet the convergent crises of this century with populations educated to understand, preserve, and enhance the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems as one continuous and indivisible system. The achievement of peace, resilience, and shared progress depends on this integration of knowledge and ethics through education, which remains humanity’s most powerful and most responsible technology.
Our action aligns its governance and ethical structure with that of all major scientific networks, enforcing the highest standards of open science and ethical democratical, transparent, governance. We are inspired by, among other, the coordinated work of the five European agencies driving the one health agenda further in other fronts: the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the European Environment Agency (EEA), and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). Together they form the backbone of the European approach to integrated health, risk governance, and environmental protection. EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies extends the reach, as mandated, to the scientific development and regulatory educational domain, ensuring that the next generation of citizens, professionals, and policymakers is trained under the same unified one health principles. At the global level, the action contributes to the quadripartite partnership between the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), all of which have formally committed to place one health at the top of the international agenda to respond coherently to the planetary health and societal crises humanity faces. Our action represents the educational and technological implementation arm of this global framework within the COST area and its cooperating regions.
From here, we are setting the foundations to reach millions. The expansion campaign is already set to reach over half million experts and institutions. EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies action is set to write and implement new open courseware curricula in every COST member state, cooperating country, and third partner nation that joins our open network. This will only happen once we reach the required agreements with Ministries of Education, school districts, EU authorities and abroad, and all required allies. All work is ongoing as required. The network is now expanding rapidly, numbering in the thousands of researchers, educators, clinicians, engineers, and public officials. Funding is structured to lift careers and institutions alike, consolidating an excellence network that supports the creation of new consortia for major Horizon Europe and Erasmus+ calls, commissions publications and edited volumes, coordinates co-authored scientific papers and books, and co-develops open source software and educational materials.
To ensure full transparency and democratic governance, members will gain access this weekend to the Leantime project platform and the Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform, which together provide complete oversight of all financial and operational processes. The budgeting platform allows real-time voting and tracking of every expenditure, ensuring ethical distribution and collective responsibility for each euro invested. Prearranged mission proposals and new member proposals will be published in open form, coordinated with other missions, and aligned with BEACON’s objectives. All submissions will follow open science and open data principles, with results freely published for the benefit of all.
The Element communication system: http://element.health.int.eu.org/, remains the primary collaborative environment, maintaining continuous dialogue between working groups. The conference system, based on BigBlueButton: https://tele.health.int.eu.org/show/tell/, will provide secure, open-source videoconferencing and training rooms. Scheduling of collective meetings will be determined automatically by the integrated time-optimization module, ensuring equitable participation across time zones and full recordkeeping of discussions. Only these online formats will be officially supported and financed for coordination, training, and dissemination, guaranteeing sustainability and inclusiveness.
This weekend we will also be sharing the action new hybrid conference organization suite, integrating BigBlueButton for live conferencing, Framadate for collective scheduling, NextCloud for document sharing, LibreOffice Online for real-time collaborative editing, and LibreTranslate for multilingual communication. These systems operate as one coherent infrastructure, enabling every member to plan, host, and document events seamlessly within the same environment. They provide full transparency, security, and interoperability and are already trusted by leading European institutions, including the Directorate General for Informatics and the European Data Protection Supervisor. The unified platform allows the action to conduct meetings, workshops, and training sessions entirely online or in hybrid formats while maintaining complete control of data and operations within European jurisdiction. EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies will not only deploy but actively contribute to the continued improvement of these open-source systems through its missions, enhancing their accessibility, stability, and usability for all. This contribution will benefit educational institutions globally by offering free, high-quality alternatives to commercial software, reducing costs, increasing digital sovereignty, and enabling full participation in scientific and educational collaboration. The impact will be immediate and profound, empowering schools, universities, and research centres to adopt the same tools for open education, research coordination, and transparent governance, ensuring that technology serves knowledge and inclusiveness rather than limiting them.
The next upcoming expansion will integrate massive open online courses (MOOCs) and associated educational platforms into the BEACON infrastructure to deliver training directly to learners and institutions across Europe and partner regions. This digital backbone maximizes the use of our pooled computing resources, supports continuous education, and transforms our open servers into the central hub of one health educational implementation. Through transparent governance, open collaboration, and collective innovation, EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies establishes the model for how Europe and its partners can coordinate knowledge, ethics, and technology to build a sustainable, equitable, and healthier future. Please, share the word. Repost at will this and all the materials made available. Invite to join in in this call for action. Thank you for being part of this network, of this, your action. Thanks again for all your help making this a reality.
I am wishing you all a great weekend.
Henning (né Enric) Garcia Torrents
EU BEACON scientific communications, dissemination and exploitation officer.