 From my experience in such long-term projects regarding communication, I believe that the most important thing are agreements. Agreements among partners. And this could refer to tools that you're going to use for communication, procedures. What's going to happen if one of the partners is absent in the meetings? If one of the partners is not responding? If one of the partners is not delivering? And also, probably giving some time among all the other issues that you have to solve in project management is to give space for project partners also to talk about how are we? So are we okay in this process? Because the agreements made in the beginning might not be the same useful at the end or in the middle. Probably I couldn't count eventually how many times I see in those I-rolls when you ask at the kickoff meeting of the project to say, guys, let's spend several hours together sharing on what principles each of us work. And very often they say, oh, come on, we have so much experience, international youth work, we know how it works, and we'll come up to something eventually and the project will be fine. But after saying that, guys, we really have different ways how we are working. And none of those ways are in any way bad, but we really need to make an agreement. And actually a mixture of ways of how we can work also can be implemented. Let's say with some partners you work more in person, with other partners you work more in groups, or you make an agreement on certain decisions, which decisions have to be made by all partners and which decisions can be made by the lead partner or by other partner, let's say concerning certain activities. And sharing those maybe even cultural differences or needs and expectations can really help to set a very good ground for the communication. I would suggest that the partners from the very beginning would agree on certain procedures, how they're going to react if something happens. So this could be connected with some emergency events or also how we're going to respond with each other and also communicate with each other. So this could be agreeing on the principles of how we're going to work. Some organizations, they prefer to work one-on-one, like dealing and making decisions together, let's say with the lead partner. Other organizations and other partners, they prefer to make decisions altogether. And these differences may cause some questions and obstacles if you don't solve it from the very beginning. So that is what I would recommend to do. Another thing is to agree on the tools that you are planning to use. And from my experience, I think it's important to think about a variety of aims that you're looking the tools for. So for example, we use tools for keeping the documentation together, keeping our progress documents. Another tool is for formal communication. So usually email works well. But in the recent times, I noticed in one project that as we agreed only on formal decision making like through email, so there is a question and we decide or a partner's meeting online, this kind of aspect of informal communication was really lacking. So there is like when you don't have a tool for instant messaging, like quick question or even something random to share with partners, that gives this distance and it's not helping for the project management. One other tool that really helps for us is actually regular meetings. We know that we have several meetings face to face during the project, but I would also recommend to have regular meetings online just to update each other. What is happening in the project, what are the progress and just to know who is who and what is what. Yeah, and don't forget that in the same meetings, you can always discuss how we're working as a team, how we're working as a partnership and what could be improved. From my experience, you always have, for example, as a project leader, this feeling that okay, we know each other very well, we know the partners, so you're hoping that everything is going to be alright. But at least my experience showed that the agreements that we made actually gave us the opportunities to solve conflicts or obstacles later on. So for example, we had one project where we created a process, a procedure, how are we going to react if a person or the organization is not responding. So we came up with a solution of two kind of official but friendly reminders that hey, guys, you were missing in the meeting or you were not meeting the deadline. So two times sending the friendly reminder and if no response is coming, then there is an opportunity to also involve the manager of that organization and if the response is not coming, then there was an agreement that the partner should leave the partnership. And actually several times we had to use this procedure and happily we end up only in the second friendly reminder. And in this case, us as project managers, we didn't feel that we were doing something wrong or impolite because that was our agreement. Another thing I think is really especially the lead partner or the partner that is leading a specific activity, always have to take a little bit more responsibility to be the person who is inviting, reminding, helping, maybe even one-on-one conversations and to really keep up with the agreements that were set. So for kind of informal or instant communication, we very often use Facebook groups or Facebook Messenger, whatever the organizations prefer, WhatsApp app or Slack. Slack I feel is the most organized way for instant communication but at the same time keeping order on the communication channels For storing documents and keeping up with documentation and visibility and reporting, we very often use Google Drive and its functionalities for example for live editing of documents. We also use mirror tool, so it's very good for strategic planning, keeping up with the pace and also thinking and planning certain activities. For more formal communication and making agreements, we use doodle polls, email, while everybody is replying or voting on something and of course partner meetings in person or online. It's very important to remember that what is easy for me, like a tool that I use, it's not always easy for others and sometimes those tools may be agreed among partners but some of the partners use it for the first time. And it's very important to give the partners time to explore those tools and even to show them how it looks like. Of course there are many tutorials online for most of the most popular tools I would say, but explaining how it works and maybe showing it face to face or like in person is always a good help. Otherwise, if the people are avoiding a tool, even though the whole partnership is using it, you can fall into a trap of missing out that person in that particular communication tool.