Secondment Between Spain and Italy

Communication, Accessibility, and Interdisciplinary Work to Strengthen the IPOV Digital Platform

Between January and July 2025, María Hidalgo Rudilla and Valeria Hiraldo Cuevas, from Diseño Social EN+ (Spain), carried out a secondment in collaboration with the Università degli Studi di Udine (Italy) as part of the European project IPOV – Respectful Care. Hosted by Prof. Patrizia Quattrocchi, from the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the University of Udine, this mobility period made a strong contribution to WP1: Digital Tool, the work package focused on the development, improvement, and consolidation of the project’s digital platform.

This secondment was not limited to operational support. It became a sustained space for collaboration across research, communication, digital strategy, inclusive design, maternal health, and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Throughout the stay, coordination meetings, technical reviews, content development, dissemination actions, and strategic academic encounters helped reinforce the platform as a living tool at the service of the project’s broader goals.

Ongoing coordination and project alignment

From the beginning of the stay, María Hidalgo Rudilla and Valeria Hiraldo Cuevas took part in regular coordination meetings with the team at the University of Udine. These working sessions, developed together with Patrizia Quattrocchi and Federica Toldo, played an important role in monitoring progress, identifying risks or delays, reorganising priorities, and defining a clearer roadmap for the following phases of the project.

These meetings were instrumental in maintaining coherence across tasks and ensuring that communication, technical development, and dissemination efforts remained aligned with IPOV’s objectives. They also helped create a more structured decision-making process and strengthened the connection between the Spanish and Italian teams.

Strengthening WP1: the IPOV digital platform

A central focus of the secondment was the improvement of the IPOV digital platform. Over the course of several months, a large number of editorial, structural, and technical tasks were carried out in order to improve the quality, consistency, and usability of the website.

This work included the inventory and export of URLs from key sections such as research, laws, and public policies, the identification of outdated entries, the creation of update queues based on authoritative sources, and the verification of official links, repository links, and DOI references. Important editorial standardisation work was also completed, including the revision of page titles, slugs, headings, meta titles, meta descriptions, citation formats, taxonomies, tags, multilingual fields, internal linking structures, captions, and image credits.

These tasks may appear technical, but they were essential for making the platform more reliable, easier to navigate, and more useful for researchers, professionals, activists, and users interested in the project’s themes.

Accessibility as a core principle, not an extra

A particularly important dimension of the secondment was the improvement of digital accessibility. The work carried out reflected a key principle of IPOV: a platform committed to rights, respectful care, and social transformation must also be clear, inclusive, and accessible by design.

Specific tasks included writing and refining ALT text in line with WCAG criteria, identifying decorative images that should use null ALT, checking button labels and destinations, validating focus order, reviewing ARIA-related behaviour, and testing navigation and usability across updated pages. Forms were also audited in detail, including checks on field structure, language versions, required consent mechanisms, validation rules, submission behaviour on desktop and mobile, and GDPR-related consent logs.

This work improved not only compliance and technical quality, but also the broader user experience of the platform. It helped ensure that the IPOV website could better serve a diverse range of audiences, including users with different access needs, languages, and navigation patterns.

Technical maintenance and content performance

Alongside editorial and accessibility improvements, the secondment also supported the ongoing technical maintenance of the platform. This included work on backups, updates, security, performance checks, image optimisation, thumbnail regeneration, cache clearing, sitemap updates, reindexing requests, 404 monitoring, and search-related improvements.

Search discoverability was another area of attention. Work was carried out to review the platform’s internal search indexing, configure synonyms and stop-words, and test how key queries performed, adjusting content and metadata where necessary. These actions were especially important for a platform like IPOV, where access to information must be both meaningful and efficient.

Communication, dissemination, and visual consistency

The secondment also had a strong communication and dissemination component. María Hidalgo Rudilla, a consultant in social innovation and digital strategy and coordinator of communication for IPOV, led or supported a wide range of communication tasks throughout the stay.

These included the review, writing, and publication of blog posts, the management of newsletters and social media content, the preparation of graphic resources for secondments and project activities, the updating of media kits, and support for event coverage and press management. Particular attention was given to ensuring consistency in tone, visual identity, structure, links, accessibility, and overall messaging.

This work helped strengthen IPOV’s communication ecosystem by making it more coherent, visually consistent, and better prepared to share the project’s activities and results with different audiences.

An interdisciplinary contribution from maternal health and microbiota

Valeria Hiraldo Cuevas, a registered dietitian specialised in microbiota, maternal health, and early-life programming during the first 1000 days, brought a valuable interdisciplinary perspective to the secondment. Her participation enriched the process by helping connect communication and platform work with broader scientific and health-related dimensions.

Her contribution helped bring into dialogue fields that are often separated: maternal and infant health, nutrition, microbiota, scientific communication, and gender-sensitive approaches to care. This interdisciplinary input was especially relevant within a project like IPOV, which seeks to understand and address obstetric violence through multiple lenses, including health systems, social structures, rights, and lived experience.

A key milestone: the meeting at SASWEB Lab in Gorizia

One of the most significant moments of the secondment was the strategy meeting held at the SASWEB Lab in Gorizia, hosted by Prof. Antonina Dattolo, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Udine and Director of the SASWEB (Semantic Adaptive Social Web) Research Lab.

This meeting created an important space to reflect on how the IPOV platform could continue evolving in terms of accessibility, interactivity, information architecture, and inclusive digital design. The conversation explored how the platform could better respond to the needs of different users while integrating feminist and decolonial perspectives into its structure and user experience.

Prof. Dattolo’s expertise in semantic web technologies, adaptive systems, information visualisation, knowledge representation, user modelling, inclusive semantic web environments, adaptive hypermedia, and e-learning applications brought an especially valuable dimension to the exchange. The meeting helped situate the platform not just as a website, but as a meaningful digital environment in which knowledge is organised, accessed, and interpreted.

This encounter also showed how digital design can be understood as a political and epistemic issue, not merely a technical one. Decisions about navigation, visibility, classification, and interaction influence which voices are centred, how knowledge is framed, and how accessible the platform becomes to different communities.

Support for the event “Challenges and Opportunities of Midwifery in Portugal”

Another relevant milestone of the secondment was the support and documentation work surrounding the event “Challenges and Opportunities of Midwifery in Portugal”, held at the Viale Ungheria 20 campus of the University of Udine.

This meeting brought together professionals and academics from different countries and disciplines to reflect on respectful care during pregnancy, childbirth, and birth. The main speaker was Isabel Ferreira, a nurse specialist in maternal and obstetric health, experienced in physiological and water births, and director of UTERUS (Portugal). Invited by the Scuola Elementale di Arte Ostetrica (SEAO), she shared her professional experience with students and faculty, opening an important dialogue on the current challenges and opportunities faced by midwives in Portugal.

The event also involved Anna Maria Rossetti, Director of SEAO, together with Patrizia Quattrocchi and Federica Toldo, who contributed anthropological, academic, and humanistic perspectives to the exchange. In this context, María Hidalgo Rudilla and Valeria Hiraldo Cuevas provided planning, recording, and digital support, helping transform the event into a source of audiovisual and communication materials that could extend its reach beyond the room in which it took place.

This work included agenda coordination, filming preparation, consent-related organisation, and the production of materials with dissemination potential. In this way, the secondment helped convert a live meeting into a lasting resource for project memory, communication, and future outreach.

Event coverage, reporting, and collaborative facilitation

The secondment also intersected with broader project moments requiring communication and coordination support. During June 2025, María Hidalgo Rudilla contributed to press management, media liaison, press note distribution, media kit updates, and social media coverage linked to project activities and meetings. She also supported the review and quality assurance of team posts and blog content related to the Midterm Meeting, checking accuracy, brand consistency, accessibility, links, and publication readiness.

In addition, the work carried out during this period included contributions to presentations and sessions connected to WP1: Digital Tool, Outreach Activities, and the organisation and integration of workgroup results into the IPOV platform. This reflects the broader function of the secondment: not only to support isolated tasks, but to help connect communication, content, technical systems, and collaborative outputs into a more coherent whole.

Building a stronger and more coherent digital infrastructure

Taken together, the work developed during this secondment helped reinforce the IPOV platform in several ways at once. It improved the platform’s content structure, strengthened its technical stability, expanded its accessibility, enhanced its discoverability, and supported its public communication capacity.

At the same time, it deepened collaboration between partners and demonstrated the value of bringing together people with different backgrounds: social innovation, communication, anthropology, computer science, maternal health, microbiota, and feminist knowledge production. This is one of the clearest strengths of IPOV as a European collaborative project: its ability to build shared tools through genuinely interdisciplinary work.

A secondment with lasting value

Beyond the specific tasks completed between January and July 2025, this secondment left behind an important foundation for the future. It contributed to a more robust digital platform, a clearer communication strategy, a stronger international working relationship, and a broader reflection on how digital environments should embody the values they claim to defend.

The collaboration between Diseño Social EN+ and the Università degli Studi di Udine stands as a meaningful example of how secondments can create real value within European research and innovation projects. In this case, the result was not only improved technical and communication output, but also a richer dialogue on accessibility, inclusion, respectful care, and the role of digital platforms in shaping knowledge and social change.