“EU-funded Projects and Online Dissemination” inspired some reactions, also from one of the Future Networks projects: the SAIL project.
Johan Myrberger – Head of Multimedia Campus at Ericsson – replied to my suggestions with a blog entry around Online Dissemination, an interesting opportunity to talk more about FP7 dissemination do’s and don’ts.
Consip – the Italian public stock company owned by the Ministry of the Economy and Finance and responsible for the rationalization of Public Purchases – is hosting an event about electronic purchase of open source services.
The event, that is part of the Open Source Focus Group for Public Administrations series, will be focuses on how the award-winning Italian Public Administration Electronic Marketplace (MEPA) can ease open source procurement processes.
I look forward to moderate the final round-table to stimulate a discussion about ongoing actions and perspectives.
ICT EU-funded projects during dissemination and exploitation phases conduct both online and presential activities, but most of the times they lack of being relevant in terms of outreach. This blog entry is aimed at giving some basic tips and hints to plan an overall strategy that extends from creating (yet another) website to the metodization of social media activities.
Valid thoughts for all FP7-projects. I made some comments from my viewpoint here: http://www.sail-project.eu/sailorsinn/2010/10/online-dissemination/
Hello there, just became alert to your blog through Google, and found that it is truly informative. I’m gonna watch out for brussels. I will appreciate if you continue this in future. A lot of people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!
The upcoming European Commission Future Networks concertation meeting next week will host an “Open source & Research” panel (agenda), and I’m honoured to have been invited to join it.
Having been writing about EU-funded open source research for a while now – sometimes interacting with running projects, other times helping them to be more visible, but also criticizing some for not being effective or to produce poor deliverables – I am very much willing to address the sustainability aspects of open source projects and the commercial viability of open source from framework programme projects.
Roberto,
I must say it was great the way you preemptively published this post before the actual event. I managed to show it during the meeting, and now many months later I’ve completed a short review post on the event.
http://www.tssg.org/blog/miguelpdl/archives/2010/10/open_source_fp7.html
Thanks again for you input on this.
Miguel.
Hi Roberto.
I have a question for you. Are they allowed to write in a tender dossier in an EU funded project that the software “MUST NOT be made available by the manufacturer under free software license – GPL or similar”. Is this legal?
Thanks,
Andrei
Dear Andrei,
let me answer you bringing some other related issues on the table.
Probably you know that EU projects must have a Consortium Agreement in place, and such consortium agreement regards the internal organisation of the consortium (included IPR) and it doesn’t involve the European Commission.
Now, there are some templates for these Consortium Agreements, a well-known one is the one by EICTA (.doc document). You might want to take note of section 4.2.7.3, especially the excerpts below.
(i) The Parties acknowledge that the use within the Project of Software that is “open source” (as defined at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php), and/or the release of Foreground upon licence terms associated with such Software, may have benefits for the conduct of the Project and promote the Use and dissemination of the resulting Foreground. However, they also recognise that certain of such licence terms (namely Controlled Licence Terms) may restrict the options that are available for Use and dissemination of the resulting Foreground, and accordingly they wish to regulate, in accordance with this Section 4.2.7.3 the use of Controlled Licence Terms in relation to the Project and Use and dissemination of the results thereof.
(ii) Without limiting the scope of this Section 4.2.7.3, the Parties acknowledge that the use in the Project or introduction into the Project of Background, Sideground or other Work held by a Party pursuant to Controlled Licence Terms [read “open source”, as explained in (i)] may impair or otherwise affect the other Parties’ utilisation or Use of or Access Rights to Background, Sideground, Foreground or other Work. Each Party shall therefore abstain from using in the Project or introducing into the Project any Background, Sideground or other Work in a manner or upon terms that would or might result in a requirement that all or some of the Foreground, Sideground, Background or any other Work must, either generally or under certain circumstances, be licenced under Controlled Licence Terms, unless all Parties have unanimously approved in writing such use or introduction.
(iii) Following the signature of this CA, any Party that is seeking such approval shall provide the other Parties with a written request for approval (“Request”) containing sufficient information, substantially in the format set out in Annex 5 hereto, to enable each of them to assess whether the introduction or use of the Background, Sideground, Foreground or other Work in question, upon the Controlled Licence Terms that are applicable to it, would or might result in any requirement referred to in paragraph (ii) above. Each Party shall inform the Co-ordinator in writing within 60 days from receipt of the Request whether or not it approves the use or introduction for which approval is requested in the Request. Any Party that fails to respond to a Request within the above period shall be notified by the Co-ordinator that it has a further 7 days to respond and in the absense of a response from such Party within such further period it shall be deemed to have approved the Request. As soon as possible after the lapse of such 60 day period (and any further periods as above), the Co-ordinator shall inform all Parties in writing whether or not such use or introduction has been unanimously approved. However, no approval of any Request shall constitute an agreement pursuant to paragraph (b) below that any Foreground may be sub-licensed on Controlled Licence Terms.
As you can see, unless projects members don’t unanimously agree about the use of an open source licenses, it can be cumbersome at best to decide it at a later stage, and this is definitely no good in my opinion. Templates should be more favorable towards the creation, the use (and therefore re-use) of open source deliverables, because is us paying for such research projects.
So said, I don’t think the EU is imposing any restriction in EU FP7 calls or similar tenders, but I guess in some special cases it might legally occur for a reason (e.g. a tender may require some sort of integration with a proprietary product posing specific limitations towards some open source licenses).
Hope it helps.
Having had the chance to chair the Open Source Analysts session at the Open World Forum I want to share here some takeaways. Matthew Aslett, senior analyst at the 451 group, opened the session anticipating some results from the upcoming revision of the “Open Source is NOT a business model” report, due between the end of October and the beginning of November. (More …)
Before the round 9 of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will take place in Lucerna (Switzerland) from June 28 – July 1st, a number of organizations are working on petitions to stop ACTA, the plurilateral agreement aimed at imposing copyright and IP rules bypassing democratic processes. (More …)
Among open source related projects funded under the sixth Framework Program, at least four of them – namely FLOSSMetrics, QualiPSo, QUALOSS and SQO-OSS – have been found overlapping around open source software development and quality.
SQO-OSS – Source Quality Observatory for Open Source Software – similarly to FLOSSMetrics was aimed at massive collection of data from thousands of projects, though with different goals.
Looking into EU funded open source initiatives I stepped into few projects, included EDOS, QualOSS and few others around FLOSS metrics and quality. Over the last 7 years a number of open source software assessment methodologies have been proposed, and FLOSSMetrics definitely achieved some interesting results in this respect, and not only.
Thanks a lot for the review, Roberto. The project is now over, but we plan to improve the platform (Melquiades) and the tools. Well, in fact, we’re already at it.
Any comments and suggestions are welcome!
The Italian Constitutional Court recently ruled that the preference for open source software is legal, while taking out two articles from the original regional Piedmont law, actually found to interfere with the Italian copyright law and the Italian constitution.
Italian free software activists welcomed the court’s decision, others put a different interpretation. I am not a lawyer nor a constitutionalist, and I didn’t make my mind yet on this, but I took the chance to have a look at what happens around the world.
Hi Roberto,
here is some other information I collected about the decision of the Italian Constitutional court. More exactly, I collected some explanation of why a part of the decision may be a symptom that there may be general problems in OTHER Italian regional laws regarding Open Source software and Open Standards in Public Administrations:
Ciao Marco.
I hope at some point someone will invest time towards analyzing free software laws’ effectiveness, eventually helping us to draw some conclusions.
All in all supporting public administrations to better understand licensing and for writing tenders to me seems a pragmatic way to promote open source software for real.
Larry Ellison tomorrow will eventually unveil Oracle + Sun strategy, while waiting I took the chance to ping my friend Carlo Piana and ask also his opinion on the European Commission’s clearance of the Oracle/Sun merger.
I wonder why all the debate has been on MySQL and not even a word was spent on Java open-ness and its specs being governed by the JCP which is not really an independent foundation like Mozilla, but has Sun/Oracle in advantage on all other parties – to me that is a much more valuable common asset to protect than MySQL – let’s see what will be announced…
Actually O’ Reilly Community along with Java World and InternetNews were the first to question, others like James Governor keep spending some words on this subject. As a matter of fact the EU didn’t raise any issue about Java, though.
Roberto Galoppini and 
Johan are discussing. 
Andrei, 
Jesus M. González Barahona is discussing. 
Johan 4:45 pm on November 15, 2010 Permalink
Thanks for the follow up!
I agree to what you state above in general, and as usual there’s always a balance between different options…
Some (personal) comments to the blog post:
– Indeed the domain name itself has an impact on the SEO ranking, although I don’t have a clear picture of to what extent.
You should also remember that the domain name is not only important from a SEO point-of-view, but also to which extent it is easy to remember once you’ve seen it or heard it.
From that perspective I think http://sail-project.eu is “OK”, as it bears the branding of the project (as I mentioned earlier I personally might have excluded the “-” though.
(And yes, from a branding/SEO perspective the usage of such a common word as SAIL could be discussed.)
From the perspective “few will search for SAIL” – partly right. Some of the potential audience will have picked up the name SAIL and are looking for more information. Of course there’s also a large audience interested in the topics as such (future internet etc), but I still believe there’s a high value in having a domain that ties into the project name.
Multiple domain names is of course an option, but at the moment we will stick with one.
As for other other Social Media channels, we will continue to explore them (watch for future blog posts at http://sail-project.eu/sailorsinn ).
And finally – transparency. Yes, it matters (and I am a big fan..), but again, there’s always a balance among several stakeholders. I do believe that the blog and other activities will remove some of the opaqueness though.
Roberto Galoppini 11:17 am on November 19, 2010 Permalink
Hi Jo
ahan,it is an interesting conversation, here some feedback.
All in all Social Media Monitoring tools would hardly be of help to monitor a common word like “sail”. Some examples of domain names you might add: futureinternetworld and futurenetworksworld are all (*.net, *.com, *.org, etc) available.
About transparency. It seems like if for many EU-financed research projects the idea of transparency is a sort of “nice to have”, while actually to me it is more of a “must have”. I will lobby in the future around this and other issues that should be taken much more seriously by public-funded research projects.
Johan 1:27 pm on December 8, 2010 Permalink
Hi Roberto, time for a long overdue reply…
For the domain name discussion – I do feel a bit confused.
You seem to mix two aspects:
Originally I took your suggestion as “use additional domains to increase visibility”. From that perspective:
– Are you suggesting that the additional domains would have the same content as the “main” or original domain? If so, I believe that there a risk in terms of search engine ranking to deploy multiple copies of the same content.
– One argument (for multiple domains) might be that each domain can “support” the visibility of the others by links. Besides that this is a bit of a grey zone (don’t want to host a link farm..) we actively decided to host the blog on the same domain as the “main” web site – and I still think this is a valid decision.
– Another argument would be that multiple domains might help you occupy more of the search results (as in some cases only one or a few results from each domain is displayed). Might be true, but such techniques might be more relevant for more commercial web sites – I do not see a value to apply this to SAIL.
Then you introduce the notion of how “traceable” it would be in eg Social Media. True, a “truly unique” term might be good from that perspective, but I do not see that another “more generic” term or domain (such as futureinternetworld) would add any value.
To sum up where we currently are in SAIL:
– Despite the “common” term SAIL we rank fairly high on relevant searches already (and this is the type of searches we see drives a large part of the visits) (Note – we don’t rank “high enough” on searches of “sail” alone, but a number of relevant combinations (sail project, sail eu, sail fp7 etc) puts us high up in the results. And we see that people actually use such terms to find us)
– In terms of monitoring mentions in Social Media we do have some additional work to do (besides eg simply tracking in-links etc) – I do not see the term “sail” as an issue though.
(As this will be more relevant when we take the next step to activate some “social media channels” I’m sure we’ll get back to this topic.)
And finally, transparency…
I noticed that you made another blog post on this topic. Will probably post something around this on our blog, as it is an important and partly tricky area.
One question/comment though – I think that the terms “transparency” and “visibility” are tightly connected, but still are different terms. Would you agree on that?
Roberto Galoppini 2:32 pm on December 9, 2010 Permalink
Good to see you again Johan.
Multiple domains pointing to the very same website badly affect search engine ranking indeed, but you can use 301 redirections. In your specific case a similar approach could be of help if you change your mind about your domain name.
You’re right saying that your google positioning is good if you look for “sail project”, but only a tiny fraction of the internet population interested in future networks would ever google for SAIL related keywords, though.
Track social media maybe not an issue, unless you want to promote a specific product/service and measure results.
EU-funded Projects: Transparency and Beyond entry makes clearer what I meant, stay tuned for more on this subject.