Notes from preliminary partners meeting Feb 4th

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Call with @brenoust, @melancon, @Stefano_Maffei, Beatrice, Erik, @markomanka, Noemi.

Also cc-ing those not in attendance: @bpinaud, @Alberto, @Nadia.

Round of introductions:

Noemi Salantiu: acting as convener for Edgeryders, was at the CAPS Infoday last year and not so impressed with the funded projects - a lot of platforms (for crowdfunding, deliberation, rating for and by citizens) but not real communities to use them.

Benjamin Renoust - post doctoral student in Tokyo, National Institute of Informatics; has been working with Edgeryders before on a mixed research approach with network analysis and ethnography; good at harvesting the knowledge in the communities through network science. Ben can’t be part of the consortium with institutional hat because as a post doc he’s legally bound to work on 1 specific project for the next 2 years. Would enjoy being involved in other capacity.

Guy Melancon - is Ben’s former PhD coordinator; He thinks LABRI in Bordeaux could be acting as a lead partner in the consortium.

Marco Manca - CERN (Dept of Development and Innovation, and Medical Application Office); is also president of the Foundation SCImPULSE working to improve human condition. Would be entering the consortium with the latter.

Stefano Maffei and Beatrice Villari - working in the Design Dept. at University of Milan and already involved in 2 other EU projects - warning that it’s very time consuming! would be focusing on the service design part of the project, but also have experience in policy e.g. on the system connection between public sector policy and citizen approaches to health problems

Erik Lakomaa - works in Dpt of Business Administration and Economic History at Stockholm School of Economics; although we initially intended SSE to be a lead partner, their dpt. advises not to get involved in such a project without someone with more capacity to lead.

We therefore need to look elsewhere for a lead in the consortium: Marco’s proposal is KITE of the Business School of University of Newcastle upon Tyne, with due experience (to drop them an email to ask with Concept note). If not, another option is to re-visit discussions we had at Edgeryders with Wuppertal Institute in Germany, or other tips we have (Lulea University of Technology in Finland… etc.)

Questions and how to move forward:

What kind of institutional participation can we involve in the consortium, especially to do the real management of the work process? Two months is quite a short time to develop the proposal. Edgeryders can only do soft coordination in the beginning until we find a lead. Erik thinks we need to get someone with EU funding experience onboard real soon, and Stefano agrees. One option is to find a European consultant for this (could anyone develop on terms here? what would it mean, how much would it cost?)

Actionables:

Edgeryders to put together drafts and circulate the following docs:

  1. Overview of partners capacities in the project (would be then refined by each partner)
  2. Process of writing up the proposal : an imaginative exercise, from more abstract levels to more specific. What would be required from each partner

We agreed as coordination channels : this working group and google drive for quick, live editing.

Next meeting: Noemi to circulate a doodle with preferred dates around 16, 17, 18 Feb.

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Good work

And apologies to everyone for not making it, I had a glitch.

Two questions:

  1. is everybody clear on what we want to do? Everything is clear in my head after the methodological note that has been circulated. Does everybody agree on it, so we can move on?
  2. I don't understand: if Guy thinks LABRI could be a lead partner, why are we considering looking for another one? Is there any specific thing that makes KITE, or Lulea, or Wuppertal attractive?

And one remark: not sure about the European consultant. I would feel more comfortable with a lead partner, not only for steering the writing of the proposal but the delivery of the project too.

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Have added Marco

Hi @markomanka and welcome!

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…and Erik

Hi @Lakomaa, welcome!

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LaBRI as leader?

Hi all,

thanks Neomi for putting up these notes. Early in the conversation when presenting each other, I did mention Alberto had asked us whether we would be comfortable leading the consortia – that is what I understood at least. I had understood the project included a technological side which made it reasonable if not mandatory.

After hearing everyone, and now seeing the overall picture more clearly, I believe Kite (Newcastle, UK) to be a much more relevant leader given the goal and morphology of the project. More importantly, I have surveyed our internal task force (on the administrative side) and I was advised to at most play as WP leader.

Sorry for the confusion. I guess Marco will have already contacted Kite by the time you read these lines.

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How sad

There must be something seriously wrong with the way these programmes are written if a consortium with three prestigious universities and a sprinkle of lean and mean SMEs does not feel it has the muscle to handle the consortium leading workload. This, ladies and gentlemen, is rent: the EC has arranged things in such a way that it will have to pay someone just in order to handle the bureaucracy. They buy no research at all with a part of the money, and they create positional rents in the entities who know how to do the paperwork.

@markomanka, please let us know when you have gotten in touch with KITE.

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Lead partner?

Did we get a firm committment from a lead partner? (KITE, Uni Wupperthal?)

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Nope

Marco has been in touch with KITE, and they expressed interest. They are confirming they have the human resources to allocate to the proposal.

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Yes, Kite. See Marcos comment

:slight_smile:

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KITE on board

I am glad to share with you that Rob Wilson, the Director of KITE, has just confirmed their willingness to join our effort, and has indicated Dr Nick Hajli as the person who will be most directly be involved with us in these stages.

@Noemi, could you please send him the doodle as well? Nick[dot]Hajli[AT]newcastle[dot]ac[dot]uk

Maybe you could at once also invite him on this platform.

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Great start of the week

Wow, great work Marko, you made my day. Just sent an email (cc-ed you) and will be back tomorrow with a final time for our meeting next week. Hooray!

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No response so far…

That’s a pity, cause I was hoping to have this person Nick Hajli in our meeting next week… by the way some of you who haven’t let me know about your availability, I’ll be back with a meeting time + date tomorrow, so last chance!

Here it is: Expired Group Poll - Create a New Poll or Contact the Owner

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Double checked with Rob…

Good morning Noemi,

I checked with Rob (the Director), and he says the reason for Nick’ silence may be due to the fact they had no time to meet yet. He is going to have a chat with him today… we might still be in time :wink:

Marco

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superficial considerations

As I have recently shared with @Alberto, I am not so much worried about our time-to-deadline ticking out, as I have got the feeling during our first conference call that we all have rather good intuitions about the proposal.

Rather, I am worried about the overall chances of success. In facts, the official statistics are rather disheartening, with a success rate for the 1st round of H2020 somewhere around 11%… but I am told that figures of the throughput from proposal (not stage 2, which are already past a bottleneck) to contract signature can be as low as 2%…

It is thus of the utmost importance for all of us to approach this proposal preparation with a stronger commitment: the will to move on with (at least) certain core activities, even in case of the CAPS grant application failing.

I have been told by @Alberto that some sort of contingency plan concerning alternative potential sources of funding are already on the radar of some. I would invite everyone to keep these realistic scenarios in mind, and to imagine how to exploit the existence of this consortium to push forward our ideas, whatever the outcome of our effort should be. In my experience, this is part of the capital of building a EU proposal: even in case of failure to be granted funding, there is a defined set of stakeholders who can attract other resources (national, regional, …) to move on with the project in a federated setting.

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Agreed. A proposal.

My suggestion is bootstrapping. The EU funding application is a good way to articulate and clarify what we want to do and how.

Once we have a clear idea and a solid application is submitted we can adopt the strategy I prefer. Those who want to and can start bootstrapping this as a shared, small, project. But we build it the way we would a commercial offering: Start writing articles and papers and doing workshops and presentations on the topic to get the word going that we are doing this. We could do it collaboratively too: set up shared docs and produce a number of posts and presentations. Publish as a collective.

If this is done online we can easily push this out into all kinds of networks and channels. This helps funders and collaborators to find the project and guide it through the application process so we have a higher success rate. Also… its fun building new, meaningful things with self-selecting participants. The unMonastery came out of this approach and its captured the public imagination.

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Very comforting

Thanks for raising this Marko, I agree and I think the start is to commit to the project anyway, and then if things don’t go as expected mobilize the resources we already have, collectively, to reach what Nadia is decribing. It takes longer, it takes leadership, but it can produce equal good results, if not more inspiring ones.

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