Concord: FI PPP Dissemination Strategy

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FUTUre internet
public private partnership

Concord: FI PPP Dissemination strategy

Portal development plan

Author: Susanna Avéssta and Jani Kaarlejärvi

Date of Delivery:February 29, 2012

Version:v. 1

Contract nro.:285266

Document Reference

Revision History

concord Deliverable

1. Web POrtal

The FI PPP portal is the very core of the FI PPP communications. It links with all audience and targets as depicted in the Table 3. The FI PPP portal aggregates tools, services and communities to foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing among all stakeholders, including internal and external users. The information and the interaction may occur in both the public and the private sphere. The CONCORD community building and social networking tools and services include several applications for dissemination, messaging and collaboration, with emphasis on open Web 2.0 platforms.

Fig. 8 The FI PPP Portal at

2.1 Demand-driven and collaborative process

The FI PPP portal has been set up and developed as a result of consolidated needs and preferences from the whole FI PPP programme. In April 2011 a questionnaire on FI PPP requirements and expectations was sent to all FI PPP projects and the feedback collected in addition to questionnaire replies also from bilateral discussions with programme partners. Based on these requirements (Annex I) the FI PPP portal was set up.

The required elements in this collaborative platform include:

- Public web

- Intranet

- Calendar

- Mailings

- Virtual meeting hosting

- Agile methodologies

All these elements have been integrated to portal offerings. The agile tool was discussed, evaluated and selected by Architecture Board and this chosen FusionForge is hosted by FI-WARE project. More about the agile methods and tool selection in D2.2 Methodologies and Tools.

The requirements and expectations for the FI portal and its usability can be jointly listed as:

These aspects have been accommodated and some evolution in prioritising between the various criteria has already been facilitated based on the community feedback. For example, the highest security has been the starting point in the process and tool development, but due to the participants’ preferences and choices to use easier and more open tools, such as Google docs, and lighter version wikis, the trade-off between security aspects have been accommodated. Initially, all document repositories were located at the portal intranet, specific and detailed access rights defined by the role and mandate in the programme. This portal is hosted and its servers located and secured by the portal technology provider in Finland. However, the demand for a wiki for the boards was accomodated and the boards’ documentation therefore started to maintain in parallel to the portal at these wiki sites (one for Steering Board and another one for Architecture Board). Equally, the meeting minutes were in the beginning drafted as a word document to be circulated and commented after the meeting among the meeting members. Currently the minutes are drafted jointly as a Google document and only afterwards converted into a word document to be uploaded to the portal and the respective wiki.

2.2 Portal hosting

The portal hosting, maintenance and technical support was selected from three candidate companies prioritising data security and integrity aspects, taking into account the assured up-time and the availability of technical support in problematic or errorenous situations. Furthermore, the availability to accommodate the FI PPP programm level Collaboration Agreement requirements on information security and its derived liabilities was an important selection criteria for the portal hosting company. The choice of the portal hosting is Wysiwyg Oy in Finland. The contract for maintaining the FI PPP portal has been agreed between Wysiwyg and Tivit which is the CONCORD partner responsible for the portal. The contract is provided as a sublementary evidence to this deliverable.

2.3 Linked communities and their sites

Through close collaboration with various FIA communities CONCORD enhances the likehood that the created concepts build on state-of-the-art research and are relevant and aligned with the initiatives in the respective research area. Thus CONCORD dissemination is not limited to its own virtual communication channels, but also continuously provides content for other related internet sites and other dissemination material.

The targeted Internet Pages that are key for programme-level dissemination include but are not limited to:

• future-internet.eu – The European Future Internet Portal
• cordis.europa.eu/ICT – The community site for European ICT Research
• cordis.europa.eu/ict/ch1 – Ongoing European FI research & development activities
• ec.europa.eu/foi –The EC activities on Future Internet
• –RFIDs, Sensors, Internet of Things
• ec.europa.eu/ict_psp – Competitiveness and Innovation Programme
• ec.europa.eu/livinglabs – Living Lab network site
• ipr-helpdesk.org/ - IPR Helpdesk
• ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/index_en.cfm –EU Innovation Union
• cordis.europa.eu/regions/ - Regional Research & Innovation Service on Cordis
• all FI PPP project websites

Links are also made to a broad range of thematic networks, associations, etc. as well as to different social networking environments, as further discussed below.

The following websites have automated content fetches that provide content to e.g. FI PPP News section:

The FI PPP twitter is linked to the following Twitter accounts:

The portal provides an option to subscribe to 1) RSS feeds, 2) tweets, 3) Snack newsletter, 4) LinkedIn disciussion group, and 5) YouTube channel.

2.4 Graphic Design

During the first six months the FI PPP programme has got itself organized and found its best-serving identity that supports the message and the needs it has for the communications. This is why we chose to revisit also the corporate identity concerning the portal image. The new image can be characterised as follows:

• clear, communicative, modern yet easily-adoptable approach
• delivers the message of a channel of communication, fresh and dynamic, bright and positive
• connects to the known symbols as they are
• takes the yellow from the EC flag stars, FI PPP logo and matches well with the numerous FI PPP project logos
• the light purple matches with the FI PPP logo, and as a counter colour to yellow pairs well
• carries the hexagon as a bridge between various FI PPP templates
• brings the community involvement image

This new graphic image has been well adopted and positive feedback has been received for the fresh, clear and unique looks of the programme portal.

2.5 Next steps and development plans

The FI portal is an ongoing process that continues during the whole life-time of the programme, i.e. all five years. The principle for developing and maintaining it remains the same: deman-driven collaborative process. This means that the far horizon is not visible, but the feedback collection, the tight dialogue and collaboration among the programmme partners in various Boards and working groups create us the FI portal backlog including its prioritisation as we go along. Furthermore, CONCORD collects systematically feedback also on the portal as part of the satisfactory survey launched at regular intervals.

In order to highlight the ongoing and planned processes at this stage, here are some plans and processes currently in place:

- The optimisation of the wikis and their single sign-on through the portal is under way. In this way also the document repository would return to be in just one place and the information security increase substantially.

- The meeting minute creation, action point tracking and the validation process is a subject of evolution, so that tracking, acceptance and signature collection would be as smooth and low-burden as possible, yet all processes open and accesible to the programme participants to the maximum degree.

- The integration of CiviCRM platform to the portal for the community mailings and stakeholder group engagement

- More relevant information sources to be added

- More broadcasting channels to be uitilised as automated as possible: e.g. any/selected new post at the portal would automatically tricker a tweet in addition to RSS feeds generated

- More integration with the individual projects’ automated broadcasts: currently news are picked up automatically from the project sites and tweets and cross-tweeted within the programme

- High-performance search engine to be incorporated as data increases

- More (automated) stimulus to the established LinkedIn FI PPP discussion group

- More links to external sites in order to increase the visibility and the portal hit-rate