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Møre and Romsdal County Council meet French Digital Nomad

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By Project EDIN
Group of people discussing Digital Nomads

 

Møre and Romsdal County Council (Norway) hosted its first stakeholder meeting of the year on January 17. The meeting was hosted in coastal art nouveau city of Ålesund by one of the regional stakeholders, Visit Ålesund & Sunnmøre. The attending partnership was also invited to the cowork concept PIR in the city centre.

During the meeting the partners picked up the cup after the Christmas holidays, choosing their next steps while reviewing the draft for the regional report that is due this semester. The Norwegian project lead and expert, Lillian Sæther, is impressed with the stakeholder’s engagement:

  • All our stakeholders are positive and forward-looking, having high hopes of making an impact and meaningful changes. After today, we are all caught up and on the same page. We also notice that more actors from the region want to be a part of the EDIN’s project as we go, which means they must be seeing potential

PIR CEO Anja Solevågseide makes up one of the interested parties:

  • Our cowork concept is new and we are very proud of it, but we need more people to use the facilities. We are still looking at how to make the cowork service economically sustainable too, and the EDIN project looks like an opportunity to share ideas and find new ways

During the PIR visit the stakeholders also met a digital nomad from France who is using the work space facilities during his stay in Ålesund. As well as working remotely, he has taken on a side job as a kindergarden assistant to afford staying for longer. He rents a private apartment, and is clear on why Ålesund and Norway is the right destination for him:

  • The nature, of course! But facilities and the closeness of PIR makes it easier to stay for longer, easy access to modern workspaces and other workers makes a significant difference.

Finally, Katrin Blomvik from the Geiranger World Heritage center and a close EDIN stakeholder shared some news on the status from November’s Arctic Digital Nomads Grant, co-funded by NORA:

  • The grant gained much more attention than we had anticipated. We had to close the call several weeks early after receiving over 300 applications for staying in Geiranger alone, excluding the Faroe Islands and Iceland destinations. We even made it to Forbes.

Now we have chosen our candidate, five families and five who arrive alone, and we can’t wait to welcome them and get to know them better!


Møre and Romsdal County Council will follow the Arctic Digital Nomads Grant closely and share more in-depth knowledge with the EDIN partnership with time. For now, Katrin and the World Heritage Center will be focusing all their efforts on welcoming their guests, hoping of course than some of them will choose to stay.