Management and dissemination of the caENTI results

By Amélie BICHET-MINARO, Université de Franche-Comté, France

Slides of the presentation

During the caENTI project, the project secretariat was in charge of giving his full support to the coordinator, under the terms of the article 7.2 of the project Consortium Agreement. Indeed, the caENTI project Secretariat managed the three caENTI annual financial and management reporting to the European Commission and also the three mid-term ones. Besides, it organised the caENTI 23 meetings, under the form of scientific coordination meetings, steering committees, annual international conferences, leaders meetings and final reports drafting meetings. Besides, the Project Secretariat was the contact point between the caENTI Project Coordinator, the Project Officer and the Project participants. Lastly, it dealt with two main difficulties. The first one consisted in correcting the cost model in the caENTI project of a participant that had already declared another cost model to the European Commission before the caENTI project launching. As a consequence, as soon as the Coordinator learnt about the problem the Project Secretariat started working with the European Commission to put the two declarations in accordance and correct the financial errors this problem had generated. The second difficulty the Project secretariat had to manage was a major one: organising the withdrawal of one of the consortium participants. Indeed, one of the territorial actors involved in caENTI had to cease its activities for financial reasons, and consequently he withdrew from the consortium during its third year. It implied the Project Secretariat managed the legal and financial consequences of this situation with the caENTI Coordinator and Scientific Officer. To conclude, the management and financial balance of caENTI is very satisfactory as we spent the European Commission funding to our project with economy and there was an important leverage effect of the subvention the caENTI consortium received. Indeed, during the caENTI three years, the project members spent 438,95 person-months on the project whereas 276,5 were planned when the project was designed.

During the caENTI project, the caENTI Innovation and Dissemination Manager and her team mainly worked on four dimensions of this issue: the protection of private life whilst creating and working on data bases including personal data, the protection of the intellectual creations designed by the caENTI consortium, and especially of software and data bases, the exploitation plan of the results got by the caENTI consortium and lastly the study of the caENTI dissemination tools evolution.

Regarding the protection of private life whilst creating or using data bases, the IDM team paid much attention to the evolution of the European and national legal frameworks in this field. They particularly focused on two fundamental texts that provide the main orientations regarding this issue: the French law n°78-17 « Informatique et Liberté » voted in 1978 and the European directive 95/46/EC about personal data protection and free movement of such data voted in 1995 and inspired by the quoted French law. This directive was transposed by all the caENTI European countries, and the national transposition texts usually specify the concrete implications of the law. We studied much these texts position as regards the user’s access to the data that concern him/her, the access of other people (especially educators and caseworkers) to the user’s personal data and the authorised way of using personal data in order to make scientific surveys and needs evaluation. As regards this last point that directly concerns all the caENTI participants as they need databases to lead their research or actions, we learnt that all the caENTI participants have not declared their databases to their national competent body at the end of the caENTI project. Consequently, the caENTI Scientific Coordinator and Innovation and Dissemination Manager encouraged the participants that have not fulfilled this European legal obligation to urgently start up these declaration steps.

Regarding the software that were created by some members of the caENTI consortium, we wanted to protect them from undesired use, whilst giving access to them to a broad users' community. To do so, we decided to apply the free software regime to them. As the number of free software has increased much during the latest years, many licenses were created to meet the specific legal needs of their different categories. After having compared the licenses we can use to protect the free software caENTI designed, we suggested to the caENTI representatives adopting the European Union Protection License (EUPL) addressed to free software that aim to make collaborative improvements, that are based on the idea to communicate the sources and that are designed to allow using them in a commercial prospect. To concretely implement the protection of the caENTI free software by the EUPL we will follow the recommendations of the EUPL guide. Then, for the software we want to better protect, we will use a specific license inspired by the EUPL principles, but in which we would make fundamental adaptations according to the caENTI project specific needs. Thus, in the created license, we will clearly forbid the software commercial use and foresee several protection degrees. We also focused our attention on the way to protect the other caENTI intellectual creations. It quickly appeared that for this use the most efficient license is Creative Commons. Indeed, it can be used for almost all the intellectual creations except for software, it is complying with the international private law, it is available in all the countries members of the caENTI languages and its philosophy consists in sharing knowledge within the scientific community. At the same time, this license allows the rights' holder indicating to his/her/its audience or partners the use conditions of his/her/its creations he/she/it authorizes, and it allows him/her/it choosing the law to be applied to the dissemination contract. In addition to these two kinds of protection, we decided to deepen the protection of four caENTI very important elements: the Pragma and Anaconda software, the CMS Catalyse and the repertory. To do so, we will make a deposit of these creations to the French National Agency for Protection of Programmes. The advantage of this step is due to the fact the copyright is directly generated by the creation, without having to make any formality. In the same way, the sui generis right of the databases producer is granted, provided the protection criteria are respected, without any particular formality, since the finalization of the database design. Concerning the protection of databases at the European Union level, the right on this issue is based on the European Directive 96/9/CE, voted on March, 11th 1996. This Directive firstly defines the concept of « database » as « a collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic or other means ». The legal protection of databases is independent from the protection of the data themselves. Thus, a database that gathers data with a personal character can be protected as a classical database, but it does not exempt the individual or corporate body who/that makes these data processing from respecting his/her/its legal obligations of declaration and information. As regards the constitution of a database gathering data protected by an intellectual copyright, it obliges the person in charge of the gathering getting the preliminary agreement of the rights holders on the gathered data. The legal regime of databases protection generated by the Directive is based on a double cumulative protection: the Directive reminds (and hallows) the potential protection of databases by copyright and the Directive generates a new right, which is a « sui generis » one, for the benefit of the databases producers. This Directive 96/9/CE was transposed in the internal rights of all the caENTI countries. Besides, its content was also integrated in the Taiwanese legal system.

As regards the dissemination plan of the results reached by the caENTI consortium during the project three years, it concerns 42 databases, 61 deliverables and 8 tools jointly performed or written by the project participants.

As regards the dissemination tools of the caENTI activities and results, since the project launching on March, the 1st 2006 the consortium has used two main instruments to communicate on its activities and disseminate its results towards a wide audience and also to jointly work on coordinated research-action activities in a remote way. The first instrument is the Internet portal, which is a public dissemination tool. Its first version was implemented at the very beginning of the Coordination Action and its second improved version was presented during the international conference of Territorial Intelligence of Huelva in October 2007. This second version of the portal focuses on territorial intelligence, and not only on the caENTI project anymore. The second dissemination instrument of the caENTI project is CooSpace, which is a cooperative workspace opened to all the caENTI members and to the associated researchers. Its main characteristic is to be quite similar to a virtual laboratory. There are three other important communication instruments designed, or at least implemented in the caENTI project course: the international annual conferences of territorial intelligence (which cover has been improved by implementing a blog website about them), the International Journal of territorial intelligence and lastly an international master of territorial intelligence with an Erasmus Mundus certification that is been created.

Lastly, the consortium decided to organise this caENTI final seminar of dissemination in Brussels on April, 16th 2009. Its objective is to officially close the coordination action of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence (caENTI). It also allows the European stakeholders knowing the work performed by the caENTI consortium during the project course and its projects of work continuation, and even widening.