On Friday afternoon we had a call to discuss some admin procedures - what went well, what did not and what should be improved in management of the two ongoing Horizon 2020 projects.
Here are some points as a summary:
- Amelia is generally satisfied with the team and how the coding for NGI is going. When it comes to POPREBEL there are more obstacles, mainly related to the low engagement of the ethnographers from the partner institutions (the Serbian team is not very reactive or motivated and the UCL team is struggling in finding time to do the work). In the case of the UCL, we are in the process of finding a solution, hopefully a Polish ethnographer will be hired soon, but in the case of Serbia we will need to make a decision wheather to pursue this task or not. It is something that can be discussed in the next consortium meeting happening in March 2020.
- John proposed to reflect deeper on the type of people we want to see more engaged in the NGI discussions in the next year.
- The ethnographers will think of ways on being more active in the processes of community managers and help to ask people to reflect on topics in a different way - there are a lots of discussions about general topics and asking more specific questions about people’s experiences would help uncover nuances.
- Alberto: in relation to the informed consent for research participation and this discussion - no action is currently needed, the ethics advisors will provide their feedback, but it’s something to pay close attention to in future.
- Noemi: the focus will be shifted in the next year and the new teams hired probably in the later stage as the decisions have still not been made.
A few things to pay attention to in the upcoming period:
- all team leaders and their members: by the end of the year, make sure you reported correct number of hours, for the WP(s) you are working for and invoiced correct corresponding amount. I am using this excel document to keep track of the staff and the parameters, you can refer to it if needed.
- there will be a few changes in the contracts for the next year, the main proposal is to seperate the two projects and their budgets + add in the annex detailed parameters for each (the number of hours to officially report, WP, monthly amount to invoice etc., so that is more clear than it was this year).
- there might be the additional change needed in relation to the article 10 (in our standard contracts), but this is to be confirmed (currently waiting for some answers).
- new contracts will be signed digitally beginning of January. Make sure no one signs the contract after the date he/she started working and reporting the time. The date of the signature of the contract has to always be prior to the beginning of the work. Otherwise, we need to sign the contracts in paper.
- there are two magic budgets we are currently using: NGI Forward & POPREBEL. This is to have the overview of the entire budget and cash flow predictions. What team leaders should note is that we also use it to keep track of the changes in budget allocations. It means that in cases you are changing the budget category or using the budget in a different way than initially planned, ONLY then your input is needed here. The instructions on how to do this are HERE. It will be very helpful if you as a team leader could pay attention of the use of your budgets in this way.
- paying services: during the Festival, a lot of events took place in many different cities and it was challenging to respect all the rules when it comes to paying a service provider. The team leaders should be those to have these rules in mind and make sure the team members who are involved in organization of the events respect all the procedures. This is important to note for the future. As Matt suggested we will create a wiki with some tips&tricks, but before I will try to ensure that the “hacks” we find to facilitate these processes are actually possible. In the meantime, please stick to the process described HERE (under “rules for avoiding conflicts of interest”). I would also appreciate if you would remind your team members to upload the justifications that they have for the Festival as described in these instructions.
- Finally, in the next year, we will maintain the biweekly Horizon team calls.
We will need better team coordination in the future where local event organisers get all the services bundled up and are given an advance payment by ER so that they can cover those costs.