Sailor's Inn

In a comment to an earlier post Roberto Galoppini pointed to a blog entry he wrote about EU-funded projects and Online Dissemination. Let’s take that as a starting point and see where SAIL are at the moment, and where we’re heading.

But first, a quick discussion on the word “dissemination”.
In the EU-FP7-context dissemination is defined as “the means through which research results are presented to the public“. However, I have noticed that I sometimes use dissemination in a wider meaning, as when I named this blog post “Online Dissemination”. I tend to include also the overall awareness and visibility of the project in the term dissemination – in order to reach out with the results wide you need to make sure that there’s an awareness even before any results are published.

Back to some comments based on Roberto’s post:

The main website
SAIL has a web site at www.sail-project.eu. The site was set up early in the project, before I joined, but I’ll make a few comments based on Roberto’s post:

Are you sure you need to start a new one? Even if SAIL to some extent builds on the work of an earlier project the decision was to start a new. SAIL is a new project, with a new scope and also new partners in the consortium. I have noticed some other projects that are more a direct continuation of an earlier project, and in those cases it would be valuable to continue to build on the previous site.

New domain name. Well, the choice was sail-project.eu – any thoughts? I do believe it is a good move to include the project name in the domain, and using the top-domain of .eu is also a natural choice. Personally I am a bit reluctant to use domains with eg dashes (“-”) included though.

What is your website for? This breaks down into at least two, interlinked, sub-questions; who is the target audience and what type of content will you have on the web site?
For the first question – the main audience is people outside the project. This is of course a very wide, and not very useful, definition. I will not define it more at the moment though – there is a lot to say and discuss around the target audience and we will probably bring this up in a future post.
For the second question – the main website will focus on fairly formal content from the project, such as deliverables, results as well as an overview of the project. I know that formal content is not always perceived as the most informative content in all cases, which brings us to the next area:

The blog – Sailor’s Inn
We need a blog. No, you probably don’t. I’d say we do.

As I stated above, the main web site of SAIL will be the formal channel related to the project. The blog is positioned to be a more informal channel. The posts will carry the voice of individuals in the project – thus the usage of a disclaimer at the end of each post. We aim to provide insights to the project work and to bring up related topics and trends that affects the work within SAIL.

A blog is also a great format for interaction – not only do you have the comments functionality, but the format and the informal character also makes it easier to write posts that directly comments on external events (like Roberto’s blog post).

During the timeframe of the SAIL project we hope that a majority of the project participants have taken the opportunity to raise their voices here at Sailor’s Inn.

As Roberto also says “Your blog is [...] a tool to accomplish your research activities, [to] extend your outreach“.

Check back often, and also take the opportunity to subscribe to the blog. It will be interesting to see how this space evolves.

Other social media
Besides the main web site and the blog, which both are found at the sail-project.eu domain, there is a number of social media sites that can be good tools for online dissemination. We will for sure explore them as we go along.

To me these sites falls into two main categories; conversation-centric and media-centric sites:

Conversation-centric sites includes eg LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. For all of these you can have a SAIL-branded approach, where you create a group, account or page specifically related to SAIL. It is also possible for each individual to use their current approach to engage in conversations related to SAIL, either by promoting specific events in their own activity stream or by engaging in discussion in other groups or pages.
(You might notice that SAIL already have a Twitter account (@SAILproject) – we created it a while ago but haven’t started to use it yet.)

Media-centric sites includes eg Youtube and Slideshare. Those of you who have read the previous posts here at Sailor’s Inn might have noticed that SAIL are already using Slideshare to share presentations.
As SAIL produces output we will use such sites whenever possible. They provide good tools for embedding the media elsewhere (like on this blog), and also provides another entry point for searches.

We should also not forget the numerous other blogs, forums and sites where related topics are covered. Social media also includes other types of sites, and it’s easy to get lost. For sure SAIL will explore these waters, but we will try to focus on a few and also make sure to track the engagement.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

The third and last day of the concertation meeting was dedicated to cluster meetings. Three different clusters had their own tracks, and myself and Thomas joined the Future Internet cluster on behalf of SAIL.

Paulo de Sousa opened the day with an introduction. Among other things he brought up a potential sub-division within the cluster:

Results from completed projects
The next item on the agenda was a set of brief reports from projects that are completed, or under completion.

The projects with reports includes: SOCRATES, EFIPSANS, TRILOGY, MobiThin, CARMEN, EIFFEL, MOMENT, SmoothIT, E3, AUTOI, 4WARD and N-CRAVE.

FIRE – Future Internet Research and Experimentation
Jacques Magen presented the FIRE project. FIRE will, among other things, federate testbeds for future internet research. This has some relevance for SAIL I believe.

Previous cluster meetings
Markus Fiedler talked about the roots of the cluster workshops and gave a brief overview of what have been covered in the past. The topics for future cluster meetings is partly open for suggestions.

Heilmeier questions
The last part of the day was dedicated to all the new (“call 5″) projects. All the projects had been asked to submit answers to the “Heilmeier questions“, and presented the summary.

The projects that presented includes: eMobility, ceFIMS, FISI, SAIL, CHANGE, SPARC, PURSUIT, FIGARO, MEDIEVAL, FLAVIA, UNIVERSELF, oneFIT, ONE, uLOOP, CHRON, EARTH, C2POWER, TREND, ETICS, SESERV and GEYSERS.

The answers from SAIL was presented by Thomas Edwall, and you’ll find the slides here:

It would have been an interesting exercise to ask the participants to try to pair the answers with the correct project. Not only would it have been a more interactive approach, but it would also have showed to which extent the answers really showed the value of each project.

End of meeting…
Paulo de Sousa once again took the stage and closed the meeting.

Most of the presentations will be uploaded to the concertation portal later, so check back if you are interested.

All-in-all – it was three days packed with presentations, and it gave me an overview of the other projects.  Some of the topics covered during the concertation meeting sparked some new thoughts, and we’ll probably cover them specifically in coming blog posts.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

The second day of the concertation meeting was the main plenary meeting. The room was more crowded, and we listened to a very large number of short presentations. The Future Internet concertation meeting covers quite a few projects, as you can see in the picture below.

Mr Andrew Houghton from the European Commission opened up the day, and reminded us why the concertation meetings are held. From the picture above it’s clear that there’s need for forums where the different projects can interact and seek collaboration.

Next up was two European Technology Platform Status Reports. First Fiona Williams from Ericsson presented eMobility. She was followed by Nicolas Chuberre (Thales Alenia Space), who spoke about ISI (Integral Satcom Initiative).

Open access and Open source
Then followed an interesting session on openness.

Branko Mikac (University of Zagreb), representing e-Photon/ONe and BONE, described how the projects have worked towards creating and publishing educational material. They published around half of the material under a Creative Commons licence.

Then Jean-Francois Dechamp (European Commission) outlined how EC looks at openness. As an example, in the European Community Treaty, article 179 you can read: “The Union shall have the objective of strengthening its scientific and technological bases by achieving a European research area in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely“.

Next on the agenda was a panel discussion on Open Source.This turned out to rather be four separate presentations by the panel members… But the presentations were interesting and relevant.

Miguel Ponce de Leon started with presenting some conclusions from the 4WARD project relateted to Open source.

Richard Graham (Bird & Bird) then gave us some legal aspects and viewpoints on Open source. It is crucial that you spend time on the licencing agreements, even for “open source”. Naturally this is important if you plan to include open source-code into a project or product. But as Graham pointed out, it is also important if you plan to release something as open source – the type of licence you choose might influence to which extent your open source will be adopted by a larger community.

At this point we should have got a presentation by Roberto Galoppini. However he couldn’t attend, so instead we was pointed to a blog post on the topic Roberto published – go read it!

The next speaker, Marko Boger, was a bit different from all others during the meeting. Not only did he use Prezi rather than Powerpoint, he was also the only one who got himself a wearable microphone and stepped away from the speaker’s podium. Marko spoke about his experiences with open source. He outlined five different business models based on open source – including “Open Source out of desperation”.

The last speaker before lunch was Diogo Gomes (IT Averio). His topic was focused on the role open source plays in the academic world, and  why open source is important at the universities.

Afternoon – an abundance of presentations…

The afternoon was a busy session. I will not even try to go into any details of all the presentations. All the “new” projects (the “call 5″ projects) introduced themselves.

The projects includes: e-Mobility, FISI, ceFIMS, EX-FI, SESERV, ACROPOLIS, TREND, ECONET, SAIL, FIGARO, EXALTED, FLAVIA, ULOOP, CHANGE, SPARC, PURSUIT, MEDIEVAL, UNIVERSELF, ONE, oneFIT and CHRON. (…don’t you just love all the acronyms..

Of course I must highlight the SAIL presentation, done by Thomas Edwall. You’ll find the slides he used here:

At the end of the day Luis Rodriguez-Rosello (new head of unit “Future Networks” (unit D1) at the European Commission), gave a presentation on where he sees the research in Future Networks to be focused going forward.

–

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

SAIL is part of the European Commission’s 7^th Framework Programme (FP7), and within the scope of FP7 a number of concertation meetings are held. The objective of these concertation meetings is to align and exchange ideas between the involved projects.

This week (October 18-20) a concertation meeting for all projects dealing with the topic of Future Networks is held in Brussels, Belgium. In a series of blog posts we will update you on the topics that are covered.

Day 1 – Socio-economics
The first day of the meeting was dedicated to the subject of socio-economics.

Despite a railway strike in Belgium, which affected the travel plans for several participants, the meeting started at 9.30. Mr. Paulo DeSousa from the European Commission opened up the meeting and we where set to go.

Morning session – “The price of quality”
The first half of the day was about “the price of quality”. The moderator of the first session, prof. George Stamoulis from Athens University of Economics and Business (and from the Euro-NF project), welcomed the audience and introduced the first speaker.

Paola Fantini, from Politecnico di Milano, represented the FP7 project ETICS. She spoke about the methodology for assessing costs and benefits for inter-domain QoS provision that the ETICS project has developed.

The next speaker was from SAIL; Tapio Levä from Aalto University School of Science and Technology spoke about Internet content delivery as a two-sided market. The slides Tapio used are available here:

The last speaker in the morning session was Bart Lannoo from Ghent University, who represented a number of projects, including BONE and OASE. The topic was techno-economics of optical access networks.

After the presentations a more open discussion took place before it was time to break for lunch.

Afternoon session – “Governance issue in the Network of the Future”

The second part of the day was dedicated to “governance issue of the Network of the Future”. This session was moderated by Wolfgang Kleinwächter (Aarhus University), who is also representing Euro-NF.

As the first speaker we once again were proud to see Tapio Levä representing SAIL. This time he spoke about governance issue in the Network of the Future. The slides Tapio used are here:

Next up was Avri Doria (Blekinge Institute of Technology), representing the project Euro-NF. She presented the Governance of the Internet of Things.

Avri was followed by Massimiliano Minisci, European Liason at ICANN. He outlined the way ICANN works, talking about Multistakeholderism as a guiding principle for Future Internet governance models.

The last speaker of the day was Eduard Tric, from Salamandre Strategies, who talked about Pax Digitalis: from web of things to directories of the future.

After the afternoon speakers there was once again an open discussion around the topic.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

Hi,

just a few words about the first general meeting for the  SAIL project.

All SAILors where invited to Lidingö, Stockholm, Sweden in September 14-16. About 80 of us met up at a conference centre just outside of Stockholm.

It turned out to be a great meeting, seeing new and old friends for some interesting talks and even some real sailing.

It was an early and bright September morning when I arrived at the hotel. The weather was crisp and sunny. In reception I met a lot of SAILors either checking in at the hotel or already having breakfast.

The first day was an SAIL open day with interesting talks from invited speakers.

We listened to Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang, talk about “What a guy who knows absolutely nothing about networks, really would like networks to do for him”.

We also listened to Johan Wahlberg from SVT Play, who talked about “Real life perspective from an OTT content provider today and in the future”.

They gave us both food for thought and some good laughs. Thanks alot, guys! There were almost 90 of us taking part in this.

The two following days were packed with hard work in the different subprojects and cross themes. But also some real sail team racing! Despite threatening rain it turned out to be a sunny and competitive team building effort. It was with great pleasure I watched my fellow SAILors transform to real serious sailors competing in teams of six persons per boat. The boats where  six J/92-race boats. You will find a few pictures from the sailing here.

Judging from what I saw during these days, the project will be a success!

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

It’s finally time to open up Sailor’s Inn, the blog of the SAIL project. Welcome!

No, you will not be able to get a pint or two. Internet is still not able to serve you that (and besides, it would probably not be politically correct to offer you that possibility). However, we hope to serve you some “food for thought” related to the work within the project. And you are welcome to stay as long as you’d like, even for the night. We’re open 24/7.

On this blog you’ll find updates and thoughts from individuals in the project. Please note that the blog and the posts does not contain any formal statements or opinions from the project or the involved partner organizations. All posts are written by an individual, and only represents the opinion and thoughts of that individual.

Nevertheless, we hope that you will find the content interesting to read, and serve as “food for thought”.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.