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Sub-Project 12: Dissemination
Dissemination Workpackage Description
Dissemination is undoubtedly a duty of every partner of the consortium. However, in order to fully guarantee the correct exploitation of results and dissemination of knowledge beyond the project consortium, it is necessary for a centralised effort to be implemented. In the LESSLOSS project, such dissemination and exploitation initiative will be developed and applied within the framework of the EU-MEDIN initiative of the EC, whereby the use of both traditional media (brochures, newsletters, advertisements, presentations) and high-tech tools (Internet), in order to achieve maximum coverage is employed.
ALGOSYSTEMS will be the responsible partner for the management of the central dissemination activity of the project. The EU-MEDIN infrastructure that is set up in the context of the respective initiative of the EC will be used for the dissemination of the project results. The following objectives of dissemination and exploitation will be considered within LESSLOSS project:
Promote, where applicable, the use of tools resulting technologies and applications resulting from the project amongst the target groups: civil protection agencies, the academic and research community, developers and industry
Prepare support products, including the documentation, in a form which could be accepted by potential users, help in technology transfer, provide necessary advices and support
All the above objectives will be considered within the EU-MEDIN Knowledge management platform, which will be developed and managed by ALGOSYSTEMS and features the following tasks: 1) The LESSLOSS Information Portal The project web presence will be designed and implemented based on the EU-MEDIN standardization for R&D project portals. The project website will be a responsibility of ALGOSYSTEMS and it will have a persistent URL. It will be set up during the first three month(s) of the project, with more content added as the project develops. Such a portal will provide LESSLOSS with the communication and dissemination infrastructure of a virtual organization, as a European IP can be considered. This public web site will provide an access point to information of the work of the project itself (including details of partners, objectives, work areas, results, interim results and working papers, public deliverables, etc.) and for related fields of work (links to other projects, services, collaborative efforts etc., relevant to each part of the project). The public web site will be one of the main channels for wider public information dissemination and may contain some of the information also available on the partners' site, subject to partners' agreement. The portal will be designed and implemented according to the EU-MEDIN approach and requirements. It will provide the following four sections: (i) Project Information, (ii) Intranet, (iii) Data Repository and (iv) EU-MEDIN interface. A presentation of the partnership presenting the background and the role of the partners will be provided in the project information section. There will be also other specific areas for downloading material available to the public (papers, brochures, demos etc), for publishing project collaboration issues (call for proposals, tenders, job opportunities etc), a calendar with the public activities of the project etc. The web server of LESSLOSS will provide this infrastructure to other partners as well in order to host their data and applications (e.g. Intranet and Document management center, Training applications, Data Repository etc) in the context of the project. An electronic newsletter (e-zine), periodically published (monthly), will be also provided in this section of the portal. The e-zine will include project news and results and will be sent automatically to all the subscribers of the LESSLOSS portal every month. ALGOSYSTEMS will be the main partner in charge of the design, development and maintenance of the LESSLOSS Information Portal. 2) Collection of metadata of research results At the individual level of dissemination activity, it is considered that the partners of LESSLOSS will present the output and results along the life of the project into national and European scientific workshops and conferences. Publications will be submitted to reviewed scientific journals magazines as well. This task will be the main contribution of the academic organizations involved in LESSLOSS to the project dissemination activity. Such partners have to provide the material that they have presented to ALGOSYSTEMS (responsible partner for the dissemination workpackage) as well as the required metadata in order to keep track of the project results and the dissemination activity. For this reason the ALGOSYSTEMS will perform a monthly call for the submission of dissemination activity metadata. The metadata can be submitted on-line through the EU-MEDIN infrastructure through an interface with the EU-MEDIN Metadata service. The interface will form the way for submitting and publishing metadata concerning LESSLOSS IP resources to the EU-MEDIN database. Alternatively ALGOSYSTEMS will collect such data provided by the consortium and will create the respective metadata set supported by JRC. The data corresponding to these metadata will be stored in the Data Repository of the project that will be organized and hosted by ALGOSYSTEMS in the server of the Project Information Portal. Thus the collection of information (metadata) of ongoing internal developments, and intermediate results and preparation of the respective metadata records to keep updated the EU-MEDIN database with the project results is also foreseen within this task. Through the EU-MEDIN metadata database the results of LESSLOSS will be accessible, in an appropriate form for public use, by the various stakeholders in the natural disasters topic. ALGOSYSTEMS will be responsible for the maintenance of the database of metadata of the project results and for the interfacing of these data with the EU-MEDIN database of metadata. 3) The Data Repository of the project The project is expected to create a large number of knowledge resources including experimental datasets, codes and guidelines, software, prototypes, models and methods. All this material has to be packed organized and stored in an appropriate Data Repository in the server of the project information portal. An upload/download mechanism will be available to the project participants for searching this material. Access to the data from outside the project will be provided through the EU-MEDIN search engine. Such access will be limited according to the dissemination policy of the Project Management Board. ALGOSYSTEMS will be responsible for the design, development and maintenance of the LESSLOSS Data Repository. 4) The EU-MEDIN Collaboration Framework Within the LESSLOSS project, a development that will contribute to the EU-MEDIN initiative is envisaged. This regards to the design and development of a web based R&D Collaboration Framework. Such collaboration framework will be used to support on line communication and interaction between partners as well as between the consortium and other groups of stakeholders, the technical and administrative management of the project, the decision-making procedures and the increase of the productivity of the working groups. In case of IP projects, such as LESSLOSS, where the number of partners and the geographic dispersion bring a lot of complexity, the collaboration framework will provide the consortium with an efficient tool for interaction and synergy. The R&D Collaboration Framework will provide LESSLOSS with web based conference facilities in order to support Same-time/Different-Place, Different-Time/Different- Place collaboration. The Collaboration Framework that will be developed will be tested in the context of LESSLOSS and it will be available to support collaborative tasks of other Ips in the field of Natural Hazards and Disasters. The envisaged framework will be developed using rich-media conferencing solutions and collaboration technology tools. This technology can be also used for organizing on line workshops and fora. 5) Dissemination material and means A Dissemination and Use Plan (DUP), required by the EC has to be created. In this document the strategies and resources that will be employed for the dissemination of the knowledge that will be gained during the project work will be described. Specification (to the extent that this can been foreseen at the beginning of the project) of the LESSLOSS exploitation plan, for the consortium as a whole and for each partner will be included. A draft of this plan will be prepared by the end of the first year of the project (Draft Dissemination Plan). The plan will be updated and possibly refined, during the final project stages (Exploitation Plan). The DUP will include references of target groups, market opportunities etc.
Standardized printed dissemination material (brochures, newsletter etc) of high quality. Within LESSLOSS the standardization of the type, format and content of brochures and newsletter for Earthquakes and Seismic engineering R&D projects will be elaborated.
A major objective of the project is to describe current best practice or usual practice in each area investigated. Thus LESSLOSS intends to produce a series of Technical reports addressed to specific Users Communities and Stakeholders, such as: Design/assessment Guidelines and/or User Manuals addressing the technical communities (e.g.: designers, building assessors), Pre-normative Documents addressing regulatory authorities and standardization bodies, Mapping/Zonation of Hazards and/or Risks addressing authorities and public administrations responsible for urban planning and risk mitigation. The final number (average - one per Cluster) and titles will be available at month 12 (M12). The contents of the Reports should be provided at M18 and their production is foreseen at M36. ISMES will be responsible to coordinate the collection of these reports in the context of the management of the project documentation.
Documents created in the project will be made public according to the Dissemination Policy defined in the Dissemination and Use Plan of LESSLOSS. Alternatively the Project Management Board can decide concerning the availability and restrictions of the project outcome. Reporting on best practice means that the partners will undertake to write up (or where appropriate encourage others to write up) areas of the technology which seem neglected or that will be useful to this project or any other project working in this area. Examples might include writing up the state of the art in the particular area worked in, or creating a European Seismic engineering Glossary or storing experimental data in relational databases of the project repository. ALGOSYSTEMS will be responsible to host the applications that will be developed in the server of the project’s portal. With respect to this activity, the partners will undertake to publish all this information on the data repository of the project with an assigned, persistent URL that will be used to access this material through the EU-MEDIN metadata service. The project brochure A brochure according to the EU-MEDIN standardization of printed dissemination material will be produced. Such standardization shall provide a consistent sample layout and content for all the IP projects related to Natural Hazards and respective disasters. This approach will benefit the EC services to have consistent information and uniform presentation of all the project of FP6 in progress. Three brochures (start, middle and end of the project) are normally planned. Normally thousand copies of each brochure is considered for production. ALGOSYSTEMS will be in charge of the design and production of the project brochures. The project can produce more brochures with specific subject and with customized layout and content if this is considered necessary by the PMB The project Newsletter An annual publication of the project newsletter is considered in order to present and make widely available information about the project progress and in particular its results and achievements. The project dissemination team (ALGOSYSTEMS, ISMES, JRC and PC) will be responsible to collect information from the other project partners, to produce and publish the Newsletter. Normally the project Newsletter will be a high quality printed, coloured, 4-8 A4 pages leaflet. ALGOSYSTEMS will be in charge of producing the Newsletter. Before published, the content of the Newsletter must be approved by the PMB. LESSLOSS will also seek for other dissemination material and activities, provided that appropriate additional funding will be available from other initiatives. The envisaged dissemination material will be based on the LESSLOSS IP objectives-methodologies (and results), etc., giving the bases, context, methods of the partnership outputs relating to Earthquake Risk and Damages Mitigation and to disseminate it world-wide and FREE to specific targets (scientific, industrial and commercial, governmental, mass-media, etc.) on DVD and VHS tapes. This is aiming at valorising LOSSLESS Project partnership, methodological and technological outputs and results (support decision system, etc) for end-users. JRC will be in charge of managing this task.
6) Dissemination activity All partners will contribute throughout Europe to the dissemination information about the project and its results at conferences and seminars. Example conferences include the forthcoming 13th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (Canada, 2004) and the 13th European Conference on Earthquake Engineering (Switzerland, 2006). Policy-making targeted dissemination during the European Science Weeks (exhibition in partner countries) is also foreseen.
Potentially they will be formed with the collaboration of the participants to the consortium, both at the national and European level. Although the project portal, the contacts of all project participants and the presentation of technical papers at scientific conferences will reach a large audience of potential users, specific actions will be carried out to target two strategic user communities. The first community is comprised of all EU, National and local authorities concerned with risk-based urban planning as well as those related with the implementation of mitigation plans (such as large-scale strengthening projects). The second important community is comprised of regulatory authorities and standardization bodies. The Department of Civil Protection of Italy with the support of ISMES will address the first community; the second one will be targeted by JRC-Ispra and the partners involved in European standardization bodies. The Department of Civil Protection will undertake to provide a list of potential users and stakeholders of the expected results of LESSLOSS. They will be also responsible to organize two Workshops that would support the feasibility and perspectives of the project. One workshop will be organized during the first year of the project and shall regard to the definition of the needs and requirements of the potential users of LESSLOSS. The second Workshop will be organized towards the end of the project (third year) and shall regard to the presentation of the final results and to the fulfilment of the user requirements by the project development and the results obtained. LESSLOSS will consider the possibility to make cluster with other EC funded project in the research areas addressed by the project Technical Annex. Cluster activity includes exchange of project deliverables; participation to each other's plenary meetings etc. More specifically this task is considered as follows: Interaction and accounting of other national and international activities is fully predicted and envisaged within the framework of the LESSLOSS project. As described in Section B.5, the assembled consortium includes practically the vast majority, if not the entirety, of leading academic and research institutions in the field of landslides and earthquake risk mitigation. Naturally, such leading institutions have been involved, throughout the years, in a large number of nationally funded or EC-supported projects (e.g. PREC8, ICONS, SAFERR, ECOEST, ECOLEADER, and many others), where they have played roles of coordinators or core participants. The knowledge acquired in all those projects is to be fully incorporated in the LESSLOSS endeavour, where exchange of results and information with currently running national EC projects is also envisaged. JRC will be in charge of this specific activity.
With regards to overseas research activities, formal agreements to cooperate, without financial interest, within the scope of the research programme and activities of LESSLOSS have already been achieved with a number of highly-reputed and internationally recognised centres of excellence in the US, Japan and New Zealand; Mid-America Earthquake Center, University of California at San Diego, Tokyo Institute of Technology, University of Kyoto and University of Canterbury in New Zealand. The significance of these cooperation agreements is laudable since it not only gives raise to the opportunity for valuable exchange of technical information with research centres that are at the forefront of research in the field, but also because they constitute the recognition of (i) the competence and prestige, within an international perspective, of the participants in the LESSLOSS project and (ii) the validity and contemporariness of its technical programme.
7) Exploitation From the exploitation viewpoint it is important that the tools, demonstrators and documents developed within the project continue to exist beyond the life of the project. The project’s Data Repository will be used for this purpose. Furthermore the Information Portal of the project will be an important persistent and continuing resource for developers and commercial implementers in the European Community and beyond. The relationship between LESSLOSS and the EU-MEDIN initiative will also guarantee the visibility and accessibility of the project results. The implementation of the web based R&D Collaboration Framework that will be developed and tested in the context of LESSLOSS will greatly improve the interactivity among partners and cluster activities. More IP in the field of Natural Hazards can use and exploit the capabilities that this framework will provide. The training material that will be designed and produced within the context of LESSLOSS will be available for use through the LESSLOSS site. The Universities involved in the project will have to consider the use of the training material that will be produced for academic purpose.
LESSLOSS partners have the infrastructure to exploit software tools, knowledge and information that will be developed or created along the project’s life. It is important to test whether the tools and approaches can be used in a commercial setting as a model for wide scale implementation of Seismic engineering applications. ISMES in collaboration with JRC will undertake this specific subtask. The main objective of the Exploitation task is to identify the LESSLOSS products, which could be of a broader interest, and looking actively for potential customers (active promotion), through the EU-MEDIN network of stakeholders. ISMES is responsible for this task. ALGOSYSTEMS support ISMES as regards the promotion of such products through the EU-MEDIN directory of stakeholders. JRC support such activity by providing scientific and technical validation of the proposed products. |
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