Nytt design - nye ting

Det vil fortsatt bli snakk om EU og funding, og helt sikkert litt om teknologi i blant. Men RITE er i gang, og andre enn meg skal bære stafettpinnene videre. Så da syntes jeg det kunne passe med nytt design på siden, nytt navn og ny url - alt sammen ting som vil forvirre folk, men tross alt har jeg ingen føringer til noe som helst på det som skrives her!

Jeg benytter anledningen til å ønske RITE lykke til, de har sitt kick-off møte i morgen (22.11.12) på Simula. Og er du interessert i hva de får til kan du følge med på http://riteproject.eu.

Ps. Vi har enda ikke consortium agreement på plass, jammen er det en tidkrevende prosess å få alle detaljene i forbindelse med det på plass. Man tror man bruker noe helt standard som alle vil være enig i, men neida - det er mange legitime behov som man skal ta hensyn til. Men jeg fikk et godt råd tidlig i prosessen. Det var å bruke rikelig med tid, og la alle komme til orde for å si sitt. Og ikke ri kjepphester om ikke det er tvingende nødvendig. Det rådet har jeg hørt på, og så langt tror jeg alle fortsatt er gode venner, forlikte og fornøyde. Om vi nå bare kan få satt endelig punktum og navnetrekkene på.

Pss. IT-drift ved Simula er også trygt outsourcet nå, loset trygt fra kai av en god kollega med meg som støttekontakt. Det ser ut til at det også går veldig bra!

RITE is a done deal - so let's move on

Finally, last week we got the grant agreement from Brussels that we have been negotiating for a while, and the RITE project is finally a reality. We are of course looking forward to finally get the project started!

Although I will be somewhat involved in the project for a while, it also to some extent mean that my role as an advisor in the proposal phase is coming to an end. So what should I do then? Of course get some new proposals going!

Right now I am at the ICT Proposers' day in Warsaw, in order to figure out what the scientific officers behind the new ICT work programme in fp7 really are asking for. We will be looking into possibilities in objective 1.2, 1.4, 8.1 and possibly in 5.2 and 8.2. Related to objective 8.1 we got some good feedback which tells me that the idea Simula-people are working on will fit very well. In objective 1.4, though, the focus of a proposal should probably be more Internet of Things than Smart Cities, and I feel that the idea I that has been presented to me back home is visa versa—so some work may be needed on that idea. For the other fields our ideas are still in early state, so not so easy to comment on them.

Anyway, if someone who reads this are looking for a very excellent research institution as partner in the mentioned fields,  please do not hesitate to get in touch!

More Grant Negotiations, and then some

As mentioned earlier, this project-thing is now walk in the park. But the park is not a small one. And the paths to follow are long on winding. And the descriptions are not always accurate. So, the DoW go back and forth, again and again. And we mess things up on our end from time to time to. Like forgetting to submit changes in subversion, and ending up submitting a version with some important changes missing.

Be structured. Be calm. Be happy. always. And tweak again and again, based on the input you will get from Brussels. And in the end, you end up with a version that all parts agree on.

I think we may have reached that step today. So, maybe was it the final version we submitted in NEF just an hour ago.

The only thing that remains then is the consortium agreement.  The advise regarding discussions on CA is relax. Take it easy, and let the partners play it out - moderate, and consolidate, and in the end we have something that everyone agree on, but no one are exactly happy about.

And soon it is summer. With so many other things to learn!

RITE and grant negotiations

It's been a very busy week, so I never got around to write down impressions after the meeting in Brussels. I just want to mention that it went smoother than any of us imagined. Basically, the project officer had no critical remarks about the DoW, and only minor requests for changes in the work plan.

We are now busy rounding things off, entering a few more milestones and adapting some deliverables, such that the plan works better for annual review of the project. We also try to sort out some nasty typos so we don't need to read them over and over again when we plan the reviews. And it is super-urgent to get the consortium agreement nailed, so I am working on that.

But - the main conclusion is - this is now walk in the park!

Still preparing Grant Negotiations

For those who follow this tread, you may wonder what's going on here since updates are so sparse.

On 15. May we finished the first draft of the grant agreement preparation forms and the Annex-1 of the Description of Work (DoW) in NEF, and submitted this. We believed then that we looked forward to a few quiet days with Constitution Day in Norway, and some preparations for the meeting in Brussels. Little we knew about what Brussels had in the works for us.

Early the next day, 16. May, we received an email from the project officer, expressing his thanks for the draft we submitted on time in NEF. However, he had some concerns about who we planned to send to the negotiations. Basically, he wanted more people to show up, to cover all aspects of the proposal. That's fair, but we got this information late to be honest. Later the same day, we got another email detailing the agenda for the negotiations. What we discovered was that we (or the coordinator) are supposed to give a 20 - 30 minutes introductory presentation on the proposal. And there are comments in the text that make us believe that the content of this presentation will commit the consortium.

Basically, get to work: Get more people in on the negotiations, and start preparing material for the meeting. (And then do some hipp-hipp-hurra in between.)

Remember next time: The first day you are invited to grant negotiations, start working on a presentation that highlights the four or five most important objectives of the proposal and their expected impact. And be modest when doing so—there should not be promises beyond what's already stated in the proposal, because you will get trouble with your consortium if you do so. The presentation should also include what has been done in order to meet suggestions and comments pointed out in the ESR. If you are as lucky as us, with almost no comments in the ESR, that part should be easy. And get enough people to sign up for a trip to Brussels. It's much better have three extra persons drinking coffee and working out of a hotel in Brussels because they are not needed at the negotiations, than having the same people and three more somewhere else in Europe, unable to get to Brussels because schedules and flights were considered to late.

But remember to start this early. At the moment you are notified it is already too late.

Grant Negotiation preparations

As I took it on me to chronicle the Grant Negotiation process for a EC project, I have to keep writing. A week has passed by already since my previous post, and it's again Friday. What was accomplished during the last week, again?

First, we have planned and prepared the practicalities for travel to Brussels. The Coordinator of the project will of course travel together with me, and our finance manager will also join us. We try to put together a group of people that make us looking good (or at least credible), and then it is important to bring a few people who will be able to talk about important things (for the commission) in a reasonable way. I think we have a good group.

Regarding NEF, almost all partners have now confirmed their information on the portal, and I have entered all the work package descriptions and resource estimates into the form. It was easy, but the system was terribly slow. It is also sad to see all the nice formatting done in the proposal just disappear in the web forms, the typography possibilities in the forms are non-existent. It's not even possible to make something bold or emphasised, as far as I could tell. At least, the system was reliable. The most important thing was that it's not possible to add figures in the WP descriptions, and we had some in the proposal. Something to remember for the future, will save some rewriting.

One final thing regarding the NEF. The Deliverables and Milestones need some more descriptive text than we included in the proposal. For now we will just make it very simple in the draft, because we do not want to do more work than absolutely required on this. However, we should also try to make the project officer happy—I still work on finding the right balance between the two.

The Annex 1 of DoW was straight forward to create from the proposal. I have done a few minor tweaks to the LaTeX template, mostly concerning layout of Section headers and design of table of contents, to make it look as much as possible like the Word template provided by EC. Just simple stuff so far. The rest of the work on the annex 1 has been commenting out some sections that are not needed any more, and changing some headers to start-versions to avoid them showing up in the table of contents.

We have discovered that the paragraph on sub-contracting that we intended to write in the proposal, related to production of an animated video that will explain the important parts (and results) of the project, just was gone missing from the proposal. At one point we just commented out the section in the LaTeX sources, and forgot to put them back in. Not strange that it was pointed out in the ESR that sub-contracting must be explained. So this is another thing we need to get into Annex 1. The plan is to draft something by Monday.

Finally, we have started discussions about the Consortium Agreement this week. As expected, there are different points of view on this, and there has been some activity on the mailing list. By an advise from one of the partners, we have proposed to carry out the discussions about CA openly among administrators and legal people on a separate mailing list. The mailing list has been created, and is will be interesting to see how the discussions unfold.

Next steps: get all the administrators together in a telco to discuss the CA. However, I'm not sure we can squeeze that in before we go to Brussels. I will put up a doodle at least. Finalise the Annex 1 draft, and submit for review by P.O. on 15. May.

Grant Negotiations—Make sure everybody is on the NEF

I am still reading up on the documents, and boy are there a lot of information to dwell on. But I understand that I can't just read, I have to do some actions as well. Today I have basically done three things (in addition to more reading):

• I had a meeting with the NCP for Legal and Financial issues. The national research council has established a system with a lot of different contact persons for the various topics. I have used their competence already in the proposal phase, but now I got directly in touch with the one that know more about the grant negotiations, consortium agreements, handling of IPR and so forth. We talked through the major parts of the negotiations, and discussed some of the main things. For instance, he advised us on who will need to go to Brussels. His advice was that the coordinator goes with supporting personnel from the host institution; most of the technical and formal parts of the negotiations takes place in NEF anyway. He also commented on issues like sub-contracting, the number of milestones and deliverables (to keep the number low if possible), as well as counting the project officer as a best friend, we're in to this together. Very useful meeting.
• I communicated with the consortium, to make sure that all of them can access NEF. As a start I asked them to fill in information about authorised persons of their institution, just to get them to know the system and make sure that they have proper access.
• I have start looking at the templates for the annex 1 - the new version of Description of Work that we need to transform the proposal to. Some sections can be just copied over, some sections should be edited, and some new stuff must be added. And we need to address the concerns raised in the evaluation of the project. It seems like the template is fairly similar to the proposal when it comes to layout and typography, so it should be straight forward to use the same LaTeX template, I think. Which should make it very simple to move over the sections that doesn't need to be changed. 

All of this was useful, most of it takes a lot of time. And tomorrow I have to keep pushing forward. One of the things I need to take care of tomorrow is travel arrangements to Brussels.  And of course keep working on the DoW.

Grant Negotiations—first steps

The first you have to do is to make sure that the coordinator (or at least his email) has an account on the Participant Portal. The kind of account needed is an External European Commission Authentication Service (ECAS) account. If the coordinator doesn't have one already, he will receive an email inviting him to create an account. Acting as an advisor (and as and old sys.admin) in this setting, I help the coordinator out, create the credentials for him and pass on the information.

As LEAR it is useful to be associated with all projects in the organisation, also during the negotiations. But EU leave this to the organisations to decide whether this is necessary. For instance, larger RTOs participating in EU projects in the hundreds will probably need to organise this differently. So, the LEAR is not automatically added with a role in the project, even for the host institution. The first thing I do when the coordinator log in (or I log in on their behalf) is therefore to add my self with the Coordinator Contact role in the project.

Now we are all set, and ready to start the real work. One of the first things to check is whether all the participants in the project have their legal status validated. In particular, if someone new participated (without a PIC or self-registered for a PIC during the submission), there will be important things to sort out. More on this and other issues in the next post.

Grant Negotiations

I planned to write a lot about the experiences related to EU project proposal coordination. But I haven't got enough time to figure out what to write yet. However, the results are now in. The proposal I coordinated my self was not good enough, and will not be funded. As I to some extent expected, we unfortunately got low scores on Impact, and was below threshold overall. So, no TEL project for me right now. But the theme will be called again soon, and I will look into the possibilities.

Simula participated in other proposals also, as I have mentioned before. And one of the other proposals we coordinated, and which I worked quite a bit on, was actually successful in terms of evaluation score. The coordinator received today an invitation to Grant Negotiations in Brussels, which will take place already on 22 May. We have never done this before, so I just have to dive in and learn. Hopefully, it shouldn't be to hard, and I know a lot of people to ask about it. So, I believe that in the end we will be just happy about it.

First thing: Read all about it in the Negotiations Guidance Notes at the FP7 Docs.

Next, learn about NEF and what else at the negotiation page.

Let's see if I can document the progress this time.

It is a complex task

As promised in the previous post, I want to review the human relation and proposal management side of coordinating a FP7 proposal. That is a daunting task. Several things appeared to be obvious while I was in the midst of the process. Afterwards and in retrospect, however, it is clear that my used-to-be clear thoughts was muffled with the energy of the process itself. Too many details involved.

Another factor is time available to do the review. Unfortunately, not nearly enough really. That's why you will not get the full review even today. Since the last time I wrote I have been involved in submitting another proposal; for ERC advanced grant this time; so I have gather some more information on the differences. And I am writing on the coordination part offline. So there will be something, only later.

Now, is there anything I can say already? Probably.

My first advice as a coordinator to my fellow coordinators is: Search out as early as possible which parts of the proposal the consortium is reluctant to write. Then, start working on those. Find out who should write it, discuss openly that it will be hard to put together. And make sure that something happen. Be prepared to spend considerable amounts of time on those parts yourself.  One particular thing to watch out for in a STREP proposal will be the Impact section. It's always the Impact section, right? Maybe not always, but certainly it's a recurring topic. Make sure that you start early on that one. And keep refining. Get input from everyone.

My second advice is that you should not let others drag you out of your comfort zone. Maybe you have a plan, but through discussions you as a group end up with something else. If you're not happy with that, don't just let it slip through. Stay on top of it, demand further discussion — either just with yourself, with a few others, or with everyone. It's your thing after all, so you are the one who have to live with the decision. This can be about simple things. Maybe you feel that a face-to-face meeting should happen early, while others demand (for good reason) that some things must be figured out first. Be sure that you are happy with decision, according to the timetable you have defined. And if you are not, don't stick to the plan. It's ok to make new plans. At least if it's still somewhat early. Be demanding within the limits made possible by the role you have been given.

My third advice is simple. Define your timetable. Then multiply it with a factor of, say, 1.5, for each partner you have not worked together with before. There will be events you don't know about today, and eventually those event will make you submit a proposal not as good as you hoped for. It's just a reality. It has nothing to do with whom you work with, besides the fact that since you have a different perspective and background, there will be events you have not thought about which will delay you.

This will be all for today. I plan to continue "later."

Puhh - one major step closer to EC-funding

— or should I rather say; the first step closer to EC-funding, since the first major step is to actually submit something. Any at Simula we submitted three proposals as coordinating partner for the FP7-ICT-2011-8 call, with deadline 17.01.2012, at 17:00; two within networks and one within technology enhanced learning. Let's keep fingers crossed! In addition, Simula participated in four more proposals, so we have actually seven possibilities for funding. That is actually seven steps close to EC-funding then.

The last proposal went in 16:45; Actually, we tried to squeeze in yet a later version since we discovered some issues with the document, but at that time the proposal system experienced close to DOS due to researchers all over Europe with the same idea as us. So, the second-best version is the one that evaluators will see. Not that it matters a lot, but of course I would have liked to get the better version in. This was the one I coordinated myself, in technology enhanced learning. I also helped the other guys a bit,  but those proposals where "finished" a bit earlier, so the better versions will be presented for evaluators.

As this was the first time I coordinated such a STREP proposal, I learned quite a lot. The most important thing I learned by coordinating was that you should never coordinate unless you also have a close colleague interested in the proposal and taking ownership of some of the work. In particular during the last 4–5 days I used so much time on communication (telco's, phone calls, IM-chat, email) that I got too little time to actually write. During these days it would have been a lot better, and the proposal could have improved a lot, if I have had someone "at the end of the table" taking care of all that came out of my discussions. Of course, I had several other people working on the proposal together with me, and a few of them long hours just as me. However, it's never the same as being together in one room. And of course, only a Simula-employee can fill Simula's role in the proposal. 

I learned several other things too. Some of the things I learned will probably never be posted online. But most of the things I learned are general and applicable to any project, so I will try to make a write up such that others can draw on the experiences. I will however try to not just repeat what others have said, so I will think through it before I write. 

On the practical, technical side, I ended up using the following stack of tools:

• For writing: The document was set in LaTeX, so I had to pull out the text-editor stuff;
1. Textmate: become the work horse on this project - because it is easy to keep several files open in separate tabs, and jump back and forth. Decent support for LaTeX macros and search/replace (but not perfect).
2. VIM: as always, because it's my favourite - in particular when working in a single file. I can get whatever LaTeX support I want because I know how to write macros. And vi is excellent when it comes to regexp work.
3. Texpad: a quite new TeX-editor for OS X, available in the App Store. Compiles and view pdf in the tool, can handle several files (and still view them as a single file), decent navigation support. I ended up using this most in the beginning when the outline of the project was created. Later on, when we where editing collaboratively all over Europe I couldn't trust the tool. Maybe I was wrong, but I wasn't sure it updated dynamically when someone else updated a file, and I was afraid of overwriting other people. 
4. Some of my co-writers was on Windows-systems and not familiar with LaTeX. For the future, I will need to find a nice editor that's freely available, or at a low cost; which will handle file encoding correct (had some issues with strange characters in some files), and which also feel familiar for someone coming from a Word-world. Ideally, this should be an editor where they also can drop images in, and have the \includegraphics statements generated for them, etc. Not sure what to use, but maybe texpad will be available for Windows in the future?
• Collaborative editing: We used a Dropbox-folder to synchronise files between all participants. In order to not have everyone running the latex commands all the time in the same dropbox-folder, I set up a bash-script that every other minute run latex on the files, using "latexmk -f -pdf" in order to not choke on errors, and also create a pdf. This was a really nice balance, and somethings most people seems to like. Die-hard *nix'ers would have prefered svn or git or some other collaborative version-control, while others maybe would have just went with sending files by email as default. I think Dropbox with a script at one end doing the LaTeX-compile is a nice balance that is simple to relate to, and easy for everyone to understand. 
• Creating Gantt-chart is a big deal for a EU-proposal, because you need to understand the timeline of your project, and define Milestones and so on. What I realise was that it is really hard to find a program that works well. My first choice was OmniPlan, because it is supposed to be good. It probably is, but only when you have specific people you want to plan the project for, on a by-hour basis. What I needed was to plan related to unspecified person-months, in such a way that 12 months are 1 year, and not some 1500 work-hours or something. OmniPlan turned out to be a mess really. Through the App Store I found SG Project Pro, which did almost all I wanted. The only stupid thing with that tool is that it is very hard to get an image (pdf) output that can be used as graphics in a proposal. I ended up using Print (after defining a custom - big - paper size in order to fit the chart on one page), and then open pdf in Preview, and saving pdf from there. Unfortunately, it was not possible to use undefined project-start and just Month or Quarter markers in the chart, so I had to open the pdf in Illustrator to fix this. It worked, but far from project. Ideally, the Gantt should have been coupled to a database representation of the project, where also budget could have been generated from - I will probably need to make something my self in order to get it right...
• PERT chart is something else needed for a proposal. This was new to me, but I saw that at least Microsoft project (maybe also OmniPlan?) can generate those. Anyway, I just made them on the work-package level, and used Keynote/Powerpoint to do it. Again, this works, but the better option will be to keep all the data in a database, and generate a skeleton or even a nice finished version from the database - which will be in agreement with the Gantt and the Budget. If I create this tool in the future, the tool should have an option of creating PERT on the task or work-package level.
• Budget: That was Excel, unfortunately. The good thing was that I got a nice template from Pera, but totally decoupled from the Gantt and PERT charts. All this should come from one database... Anyway, Excel kind of works and is easy to use for everyone. Just pay attention to formulas if you extend with more rows and/or columns!
• If I create this database thing, I will also add auto-generation of latex code for the important and mandatory tables for work packages, effort, deliverables, milestones, and work package descriptions. Now, I had to sync everything manually by hand - which is not fun. That time could have been better spent on writing important text.
• As mentioned already, the document was set with latex - pdflatex to be exact, with Sorbonne font in 11pt, and with some occasional Verlag. It just look much better that way.
• Finally, some work on citations is required should I do this again (which I probably will). Handling bibtex for those not familiar with it is not easy. I had a look at Mendeley with an idea of collaboratively using Mendeley to collect all references, and then export bibtex from there. But when I searched for some of the things we needed to cite, and found that they where not present in Mendeley, so we would have needed to add them manually, I skipped that idea. However, in the document we submitted there was a lot of citations marked ? because there were some errors in the bib-file. So, this is an area where work is needed. 

Did I used other tools as well? Probably - at least for communication. And notetaking (Evernote), and todo's (Todo by Appigo). In particular the last one should be handled with a collaborative tool the next time (Symphonical.com come to my mind, I think it will be excellent for such a process). Enough about the technical stuff.  On the human relation side, maybe the consortium should have meet twice in the proposal phase, not just once as we did. But this, and other things, will be stuff for a later post.

Until then; take care!