Wartime extension, some extra activities

Wellbeing in Europe Workspace
#1

Hello all, a further extension of three months for POPREBEL looks inevitable. The war in the Ukraine has impacted severely the group, with most partners in Eastern Europe, and all with colleagues, students etc. in the Ukraine, Russia, or both. This requires another amendment to the GA.

Jan reminds us that the project is underspending and invites us to propose extra activities. I proposed to devote some more resources to:

  • impact conference
  • data analysis
  • writing
  • tech support

So, please would @nadia, @matthias and @hugi submit requests? Anything you want to do? I’ll think up my own stuff. @marina and I will then do the negotiation.

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Let's schedule a graphryder training for the group!
#2

To update everyone on this.
@alberto @ivan and I had a call with Jan, Richard and Eranda today.
We basically got all we requested (100k in total), BUT, the 20k we asked for under “other goods and services” will in theory stay within UCL. This means that in practice, we can use these extra 20k for the final impact conference as planned and publish open calls for the service providers we will need, with the difference that they will invoice directly to the UCL instead of us.

Screenshot 2022-05-05 at 18.08.20
Screenshot 2022-05-05 at 18.08.201301Ă—440 107 KB

In order for this to be approved by the PO, we need to provide some details on what kind of services we will be buying. @nadia can you form a short paragraph mentioning the type of services (copywriters, social media managers, designers…) you will need? Remember, this will be in addition to the already existing budget for the conference which is 20k for services.

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#3

@nadia @ivan any news on this?
I think we should speed this up so that I can ask UCL when the new budget will be confirmed.
The best would be if you can prepare an overview of how you are planning to spend 40k of other goods and services for the conference, so we can understand what UCL will pay and what will go from our own budget.

#4

Agreed.

@nadia, let’s sit and run through this.
Tomorrow / Wednesday?

#5

@ivan, @marina, advice: don’t call a meeting on this. Just write it yourselves. Should take no more than five minutes. Looping in each other is inefficient. Online comms services, illustration, copywriting, translation, paid ads, something like that. It does not require a lot of back-and-forth.

#6

The reason we are asking is because this wouldn’t cost 40k all together

#7

Then add: venue renting, facilitators, video production etc.

We can also change this later, after getting the amendment approved. Resist the temptation to produce a detailed (and vulnerable to attacks and objections) budget.

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#8

wednesday- ill be on the road again tomorro

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#9

@marina, what is the deadline to use this budget?

#10

The project is being extended until the end of December this year. However, there are some internal procedures at the UCL that still need to be resolved, so we don’t have the official confirmation on this additional budget. It should arrive next week hopefully. But if you’re asking for the deadline, it’s 31/12/22.

#11

I have talked to the guys at OuestWare, and they can make time for Graphryder work this fall.
If I use 5k for my own work on GR and 10k for them, that would mean we need to somehow move 10k from staff to services. When I talked to @alberto about this in the past he seemed to think this would be perfectly possible.

@alberto, @marina - how do we proceed? Can I start planning for this with them?

#12

Hmm… we have so far allocated 12K in all for Graphryder, not 15 (see table at the beginning of this thread), pending approval by UCL. They are all to staff because, as I recall it, we were thinking more of an iterative work, like what was done for OpenEthno: ethnographer use the software, they ask for changes, sometimes we say yes and implement; whichever changes we envisioned (edge strength methods, mostly) seemed to be implementable by you, Hugi. Also, documentation and user manuals.

I don’t think it is a problem to move a little money to OGS. But we (1) need to find an extra 3K and (2) are we sure that this is third-party development, where we give a company specifications and then they implement? If we do this, we lose out on user feedback, in the next two months people in POPREBEL will be using GR a lot.

#13

It looks like 15k to me. Or does total mean something else than total funds available?

Is this not applicable?

I don’t think it will be a problem to work iteratively with OuestWare. We will simply involve them in those calls. I worked iteratively with them last time too, I just didn’t include anyone but myself in that iterative loop as I wanted to avoid scope-creep that inevitably comes when end users are involved in designing a product from scratch. Now that we have the dashboard and want to do tweaks and modifications based on feedback, it’s a lot more feasible to spend more of the developers time on gathering feedback and discussing with users, as the heaviest development work is already done.

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#14

12K is direct costs, those actually paid out (first column). To these you add the obligatory 25% of Horizon 2020 towards indirect costs, which are 3K, which means that, to pay out 12K we must request 15K from the budget.

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#15

Perhaps we could ask UCL to pay this for documentation of GR aimed at ethnographers?

#16

They are struggling with admin as is. We’ll make do with our resources, I’d rather not slow down this anymore.

#17

Alright, I could start by offering OuestWare 7k, and then if we need a little more we can see if we can find it somewhere?

#18

Also, @hugi you didn’t manage to sign your contracts in paper in Brussels, but you have the total of 8k (not 5k). First contract was 5k then we added 3k for the extension…

#19

Ah no, and I was even at the Reef. Sorry, :tropical_fish: memory.

Ah, right! Okay, gotcha. But is this 8k part of that 12k referenced above as “Tech support: Improving Graphryder”? Or is there 12k available in addition to the 8k in my contract?

#20

As far as I remember, we made this initial re-distribution according to our remaining (existing) budget. See here: https://edgeryders.eu/t/an-opportunity-extra-activities-in-poprebel-in-2022/16491/10

Then, we decided to ask for extra, which is still to be confirmed by the UCL.