The Community Network for Practices in Plant Virology (VIRNET) project and its continuation under VIRNET2, aims to encourage knowledge exchange and collaboration among plant virology researchers. Initially the goal was to organize two in-person meetings between Euphresco project partners and other researchers. However, due to COVID-19 restrictions, the project’s duration was extended to ensure at least one physical meeting which finally took place in August 2023. This meeting was co-organised with various partners*, including EPPO and Euphresco. Prior to this, three half-day online meetings were held in March 2022 to maintain networking efforts during the pandemic. These meetings aimed to raise awareness of recently started, ongoing and proposed Euphresco virology projects, brainstorm topics for future Euphresco calls, and discuss challenges in plant virology. This initiative enabled Euphresco project coordinators to share their results with a broader audience than just the participants of their own projects. Despite challenges of online workshops and timezones, speakers and participants were present from across the Euphresco family, including Australia and the USA/Canda. This initiative, starting mainly with Euphresco project participants, extended to include other plant virologists but also other researchers as well as policymakers working in plant-health, resulting in over 117 participants representing 31 countries, at the in-person August 2023 meeting. This meeting, organised as an ICPP satellite event titled: ‘High-throughput sequencing in plant virology: from discovery to diagnostics’, facilitated discussions on new research ideas and potential collaborations. Since the Euphresco coordinator was actively involved in organising this in-person meeting, we dedicated time to a brainstorming session. During this session, participants suggested ideas for future topics for calls as well as topics to be discussed during EPPO/Euphresco scientific colloquia - events organized to connect scientists and policymakers and discuss recent scientific developments that have an impact on policy.