The development and fostering of Global Science Communities is the major duty of MAGIC Project Work Package 5 (WP5), that is led by UbuntuNet Alliance.  

WP5 Participants: RedCLARA, GÉANT, RENATA, RNP, CUDI, GRNET, CKLN, WACREN, ASREN, TEIN*CC, NITC, NIIFI, CSIR.

WP5 Objectives:

  • To invite/select three global research and scientific communities with common topics of research and education interests which include researchers of the MAGIC participating regions to participate in collaborative initiatives using advanced networks and services.
  • To extend/update the Funding Opportunities Database and Partner Search application developed by the ELCIRA Project to include information from other MAGIC developing regions and provide valuable funding information for the global communities and other research groups worldwide.
  • To foster the collaborative work of Global Science Communities by actively promoting the participation of researchers from all participating regions in European Commission Calls and those of other international funding agencies with high impact in the participating regions and other networking activities.
  • To promote and foster the use of collaboration technologies among worldwide research communities, encouraging the proper and active use of the collaborative platforms, services and tools, by supporting them with training material and activities to learn how to use the tools.
  • To use these collaborative platforms to spread knowledge and the practices of the Global Science Communities by sharing information and experiences among experts in the priority fields identified, looking to raise awareness of prevailing issues to wider audiences including policy makers, and also, to foster and improve collaboration among researchers of the MAGIC regions.

Description of work

WP5 will include the participation of the Research Communities, raising their awareness and training communities on the use of collaborative technological platforms. This is essentially a coordination activity where the project team will establish a small set of relevant user communities working on areas/topics that are of high interest in a significant number of world regions. Preference will be given to user communities that have experience of working in international projects and have at least worked in projects involving at least two of the regions involved. The global communities will be provided with online collaborative tools and will be trained on how to use them. In addition, the communities will be provided with tools to identify funding opportunities for their research. The project will expand the Funding Opportunities and Partner Search portal developed in the ELCIRA project, and use it to disseminate funding opportunities. Agreements with European and other funding agencies will be sought to automatically include information on their calls on the application. Following the experience of projects such as GLOBAL, ALICE2, ELCIRA, GILERA, CHAIN and CHAIN-REDS the project will organize Virtual Information days to take advantage of the information provided during EC Information Days and disseminate that information worldwide and specifically to the selected user communities.

Activities:
5.1 Agreements on a set of Worldwide User communities of common interest to the participating regions.
5.2 Implementation of an Information System on Worldwide funding opportunities aimed at the end users and the user communities.
5.3 Development of a set of Worldwide Virtual days to foster collaboration at a worldwide scale on the above selected topics.
5.4 H2020 Virtual information days to promote participation in International Calls.
5.5 Training material for the use of Cloud provided applications for collaboration.
5.6 Worldwide User communities virtual meetings and seminars.

The communities:

So far four Global Science Communities (GSC) have been raised, one in e-Health, other in Biodiversity, one on Environment and finally one on Remote Instrumentation. Each one of these GSC had its first virtual meeting during last February, introducing their objectives and action route to all the interested scientists all over the world. You can access all the presentations given and to the videos of these meetings by clicking in the following links and exploring its contents:

MAGIC Activities