Online events, webinars, and talks to get you through COVID 19´s self-isolation period

This post is part of a collaborative effort between Startup Portugal, The Next Big Idea, and Sapo24, meant to create relevant content to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.
Content available in Portuguese.

With most of the country closed down this April as a result of the ongoing global pandemic, it is important to keep growing as individuals and as a community as we learn to adapt to this new concept of self-isolation and social distancing.

To help adjust to this new and hopefully temporary lifestyle of remote living, many academic institutions, startups, and private organizations across Portugal have turned their attention to sharing relevant and alternative material online to keep you informed of what is going on in our ecosystem. This can be accessed through various digital platforms such as webinars, online events, and e-talks.

Therefore, to help you stay informed and keyed up during COVID-19, we have compiled a list of progressive online sources for anyone interested in learning about what is being done in our current ecosystem and how we can continue to learn during this pandemic.

Stay Home, Keep Growing

We wanted to start with one of our own initiatives first, called the Stay Home, Keep Growing campaign. Stay Home, Keep Growing was created by Startup Portugal in partnership with Le Wagon as an online event platform for technology companies. Stay Home, Keep Growing offers periodic webinars, workshops, and talks with different topics of interest to those who are part of this ecosystem, such as entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology. You can catch a live talk every Tuesday and Thursday during quarantine time via the Startup Portugal Facebook page. Simply follow #stayhomekeepgrowing.

Smart Portugal Webinars

The Smart Portugal webinars are a new initiative that promotes the ability of urban intelligence to play a key role in combating the pandemic. Organized by the NOVA Cidade Urban Analytics Lab, Smart Portugal Webinars will present a set of weekly webinars with different figures from the area of urban intelligence. The webinars will address the capacity of urban intelligence to play a key role in combating the pandemic and share how it can be an effective weapon on the battlefront. You can follow updates about the webinars through the NOVA Cidade website and social media pages.

Moviinn Talkiinn Webinar

Moviinn, together with Nomadx, has organized a weekly webinar during COVID 19 that discusses the ins and outs of moving and living in Portugal. The webinars will address topics such as obtaining Portuguese Citizenship and the Golden Visa, giving you an opportunity to ask any question you may have about how to attain and process necessary documents associated with these entities, among others. The webinars are held every Thursday and you can sign up for them on the Moviinn Facebook page.

Makesense Portugal

Makesense Portugal is a public group with the purpose of helping social entrepreneurs in Portugal to find solutions to their challenges and social projects in various areas, including education, health, environment, and nutrition. Over the course of April, Makesense Portugal has been organizing various online events around how to learn about and provide Lisbon’s impact initiatives an opportunity to engage with the Lisbon community. These will take shape on the form of online events that will be conducted via video chat. You can find all the upcoming online events on the Maksense Portugal Meetup page.

Role To Play Webinar Series

The Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE) has been working with staff, students, and partners to mobilize to not only adapt to distance learning and working but also to support the community to deal with the several challenges brought on by our current context. As a result, the Nova SBE created the Role to Play campaign which shares daily webinars and articles about the various roles you can play as an individual in this crisis. Every day at 6 pm, the school shares a 20-minute webinar, held with faculty from Nova SBE and several other market specialists, namely educators from Singularity University Portugal and other European business schools. You can sign up for the upcoming live sessions or explore the recording of the previous webinars via their campaign website. Don´t forget to follow #roletoplay.

FMUL Talks

In the belief that information is one of the most powerful weapons we have as a community in the face of the current pandemic, the Faculty of Medicine inside the University of Lisbon (FMUL) has organized a series of FMUL Talks, in partnership with Janssen, as scientific discussions dedicated to the pandemic caused by Sars-CoV-2. The Talks will take place throughout the month of April, every Tuesday at 6 pm. The Talks will have a session in which the university teachers will analyze and clarify the most diverse issues associated with the pandemic. For more information about the talks and where to access them, take a look at the Facilities website.

Each of these platforms presents something fresh and different from the current mainstream sources out there that might be overwhelming your social media feeds. By supporting our local community initiatives, we can all learn and grow together while living in the current self-isolation period. This April, let us use this time wisely to grow deeper connections and share new ideas within our ecosystem.