Speakers
Ms
Annabel Grant
(GEANT)Dr
Michael Enrico
(GEANT)
Description
The first GEANT Open Call was conducted between April 2013 and March 2015 resulting in the funding of 21 small, highly focused research and development projects of 18 months in duration.
Considered within the project to be a real success story (a view recently vindicated in a positive project review), this exercise was conducted as part of GEANT's community engagement efforts and innovation strategy (the GEANT Innovation Programme). Primarily it was intended to bring some new blood into a well-established R&E networking ecosystem that would hopefully bring with it plenty of networking innovation that would in turn lead to tangible benefits to be quickly realised by the R&E network user communities in Europe and beyond.
This presentation will show how the open call programme has been used to fund innovative projects designed to address three broad objectives: (i) soliciting interesting new use cases for the facilities made available by the GEANT project; (ii) bringing new expertise into the project to undertake specific pieces of R&D work within the GEANT work programme and (iii) conducting a more open solicitation for interesting new ideas with a bearing on the future evolution of R&E networking (a "wildcard" element to the programme).
The first part of the presentation will cover the way in which the open call programme was planned and executed and will place particular emphasis on the innovative way in which the projects were integrated into the larger GEANT project by adopting a holistic approach to the management of the programme. Consequentially, many of these open call projects have led to useful results that will benefit the GEANT network, the services running over it, the NRENs connected to it and their users - for example, services based on SDN related technologies. Some of them have wider implications that could potentially be of interest to other e-Infrastructures especially in the context of developing coordinated service offerings.
A number of the significant results will be identified and we will reflect on the overall lessons learned during the running of this first GEANT open call. Innovation and the impact of that innovation will also be examined in the presentation, for example it is expected that more than 20 papers will be published in peer reviewed journals as a direct result of the projects' support.
Finally, the presentation will describe preparations for the next round of open calls that it is hoped will take place during the next phase of the GEANT project (GN4-2). Discussions are underway at the time of writing this abstract but a clear idea of how these next open calls will be conducted will have been established by the time of the EGI Community Forum. A few guiding principles are already known. Overall there is expected to be a greater focus on service innovation and working with new commercial partners and other e-infrastructures.
Additional information
In principle, this could form part of a session describing plans for a future joint e-Infrastructure open call.
Links, references, publications, etc.
Public web pages on Open Calls:
http://www.geant.net/opencall/Pages/default.aspx
Final reports from Open Call projects:
http://www.geant.net/Resources/Open_Call_deliverables/Pages/Home.aspx
Primary authors
Ms
Annabel Grant
(GEANT)
Dr
Michael Enrico
(GEANT)
