CON

Ferran Cabrer i Vilagut

Consen EEIG Euro-Group

Agrupació Europea d'Interés Econòmic

EEIG
T: +34 93 4238267
F: +34 93 4233430
Jaume fabra 12
08004 Barcelona
www.CONSEN.org
consen@consen.org

CONSEN - CONSEN (EEIG) Euro-Group European Economic Interest Grouping, is an alliance of European SMEs who have agreed to cooperate as Euro-Cluster in projects and tenders throughout Europe. The main objective of the CONSEN (EEIG) is to establish an ongoing and effective dialogue between members focused on Research, Development and Innovation European projects. These companies are all experts in Open-Source and Information Society Technologies and through the Euro-Group, are able to operate contracts in all countries in Europe.

CONSEN - CONSEN (EEIG) Euro-Group European Economic Interest Grouping, is an alliance of European SMEs who have agreed to cooperate as Euro-Cluster in projects and tenders throughout Europe. The main objective of the CONSEN (EEIG) is to establish an ongoing and effective dialogue between members focused on Research, Development and Innovation European projects. These companies are all experts in Open-Source and Information Society Technologies and through the Euro-Group, are able to operate contracts in all countries in Europe.

CONSEN is a non-profit, independent and international consulting firm constituted in November of 2004 in Barcelona. The CONSEN partner's commitment maximizes the Socio-Economic benefits of CONSEN activities. The Key-Concept is to consider CONSEN as a European-OS/IST-Cluster built with the networking methodologies, competences and best practices of our partners. The CONSEN member's strategy is to share resources, to exploit and manage the competencies of their members with synergic effect.

CONSEN grouping's acts as extension of the company internal organization, fostering cooperation and transferring technology, innovation and knowledge from the scientific world to companies and reach the local and sectoral business and competitiveness leadership. CONSEN facilitates them to acquire and put into practice new technologies, cooperate with research institutes to develop systems and application in response to industrial demand of creation of new markets, new business models and new profit centres.

CONSEN is member of the Internet Quality Agency (IQUA) and the European Business Supportive Network (eBSN).

This CONSEN concerns the OPEN-SOURCE philosophy, technology, business and innovation, which is, by definition, an open door to the cooperation, to the partnership and thus to the networking success. The CONSEN objectives are to present and carry out innovative initiatives and projects in IST, trying to maximize the quality and the socio-economic benefits.

CONSEN expects by means of the CIP-MCI project improve their internal injection of knowledge and innovation to the members, boost the conversion of the innovation in local business for the members and reinforce their European representation in parallel with the EU-FP6 projects going-on.

- the strategy

Gain KW in the following areas:

- Research, Development, Implementation, Promotion and Sustainable Exploitation of the cooperative technologic and business networks formed by micro and small companies and organization.

- RTD+I of Organizational and Operative problems, as imagining, legalizing, licensing, etc.

- Promotion and Sustainable Exploitation to create a real wide market – connected, sorted and structured - of opportunities.

- Systemic Procedure to “bottom up” initiatives, research and leverage knowledge and transfer from the European Organization the technology and innovation to individual members with efficiency. Finally help and train individual members to convert this innovation in competitiveness and local business for its benefit and organization reinvestment, etc.

- Detection and definition in the “Variety” of the information and communication environment of opportunities for synergic effects.

- Clustering resources and “hibridyzing” competences catalogue for improving Technological results and Business generation.

3.6 Contributions to standards

EGs On-Net will stimulate open standards which need popularization. Open standards help the easier sharing of information and the communication.

The popularity and necessity of a standard grows with its diffusion. The communication network fosters open standard by using them. Further applications and services that like to be able to attach to this communication network have to use these open standards and thus will strengthen them. The results and the experiences gained from this project will be published. These insights can also lead to new standards or to the adjustment of existing standards.

CIP-MCI distributes the documentation and the documents generated by the project in the popular proprietary standards but also in the open standards, so they will be available to anyone without any exceptions. Such support for the open standards in large scale is of great value to the growth of those standards and their further popularization. This also helps the interoperability one of the raising problems on the European Information Systems and also and specially in eHealth.

CIP-MCI evaluates the possibilities of passing their output through standardization to define and establish their interfacing and cooperation processes with standards bodies at an early point in time during their lifespan to upgrade their output and provide them with additional means to disseminate their results, but it will also support the overall goals of the eEurope programme and standardization.

It has to be emphatized the positive effects that CIP-MCI thought the EEIG can produce in the dissemination and adoption of European standards. The Euro-Groups act as adviser and trainer, and some times requesting some standards in their members. This produce an serial effects than end in the quick adoption of common rules in the grouping.

International accounting standards (IAS)

In example, EU2cooperation EGs On-Net can contribute in the European Union harmonisation of the financial statements of companies in order to guarantee the protection of investors. By applying international accounting rules, it sets out to maintain confidence in the financial markets while facilitating cross-border and international securities trading.

"The EU's Financial Reporting Strategy: The way forward", in which it suggested that the comparability, accuracy and transparency of European companies were an essential aspect of the integration of European financial markets and of their international competitiveness. Furthermore, the harmonisation of these statements is considered essential for the Financial Services Action Plan.

In addition, the companies concerned support the adoption of a set of unique internationally recognised rules since this would facilitate the marketability of securities, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and the raising of finance.

To cement the conditions necessary for an integrated, efficient capital market by improving the comparability of accounts in the single market so as to facilitate competition and the free movement of capital;

Multi-linguality and standards

Additions to one or more of following standard referential resources are envisaged.

· WordNet; Sets of synonymous words with basic semantic relations between them (English)
· EuroWordNet; Sets of synonymous words with basic semantic relations between them (Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German, French, Czech and Estonian)
· ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2; International Standards for Language Codes.
· ISO 2688:1986; Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri
· ISO 5964:1985; Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri
· A portfolio of existing thesauri related to the addressed topics (to be investigated in the first phases of the project).

Knowledge representation and interoperable metadata standards

In the field of knowledge representation the Topic Maps ISO standard and OWL W3C standard shall be recognized.

As the Internet provides a vast collection of information resources it becomes increasingly important to improve access to this mass of information and for the development of better search, retrieval, and organizational tools. The use of metadata (data about data) provides part of the solution to this problem. The Dublin Core is a metadata element set which intends to facilitate discovery of information resources. It provides an architecture for resource description (based on the three elements -- standardized semantics, a definitive syntax, and a framework for exchange –) that can work across all subject areas on the Web. The standard consists of 15 broad categories (elements) that are useful for creating simple, easy-to-understand descriptions for most information resources and can be combined to form more complex descriptions by adding other chunks of metadata if needed. The Dublin Core has been in development since 1995 through a series of focused invitational workshops that gather experts from the library world, the networking and digital library research communities, and a variety of content specialties.

In this respect the project CIP-MCI will through a workshop agreement prepare the basis for standards to be agreed upon, stimulating the uptake of the outcomes of the project and hence disseminating at a larger scale the achievements. The Workshop Agreement (AWA) aims at clarifying ICT standardisation in relation to (cognitive) disabled and older people in the context of Design-for-All. This agreement will be initially established at the kick-off of the first workshop and will then be enhanced throughout the entire project duration, and with valuable input coming from the other workshops. The AWA is a technical agreement, developed by an open workshop structure within the framework of CIP-MCI and owned by it as a publication, reflecting the consensus of identified individuals and organisations with the consortium responsible for its contents.

The Workshop Agreement therefore represents a lower level of consensus and transparency than that represented by e.g. the European Standard (EN) and is not designed to support legislative requirements (e.g the new approach) or to meet market needs where significant health and safety issues are to be addressed. It is instead designed to offer market players a flexible and timely tool for achieving a technical agreement where there is no prevailing desire or support for a standard to be developed. Nevertheless, while the AWA is not designed to support legislation or regulation, the AWA concept does not in itself preclude this possibility. Important is however that the content of the AWA should not conflict with existing European standards or current European standardisation activities. The avoidance of conflict is to safeguard the overall coherence of the deliverables adopted by the European standards bodies and the credibility of European standardisation in the market. This does not mean though that the AWA cannot compete with the requirements of a European standard nor indeed compete against another workshop agreement.

The Workshop Agreement must be withdrawn if the publication of an EN brings the AWA into conflict with the EN. Finally, an established Workshop Agreement can be proposed for conversion to an EN on condition that all the characteristics of an EN and its development process are met. CIP-MCI establishes itself as a main reference point for other initiatives, consequently enforcing the impact of the project on the related industries associated with IST-EGs.

Finally, smooth communication and synchronisation within and between EGs in an enlarged Europe requires a basic set of common references. A study of existing material should reveal useful methodologies and modules that correspond with the typical character of the participating EGs and their target businesses. Where necessary, additional (sub-) modules should be created pertaining to meta data, lexicons, thesauri, semantics and ontologies.

- Proposal for new WP (the WP-description will be about one page)

WP-DE Dissemination and Exploitation

In this workpackage it will be tested the application of the results in several countries corresponding to the partners included in the consortium, and therefore, solving needs associated to CIP-MCI.

This work package is intended to develop a concrete strategy for the dissemination of results, the establishment of strong know-how about CIP-MCI, …..

By always respecting and fully applying current regulation, and even going further in requirements set by EU directives. Of course, the deployment of CIP-MCI will look at the increasing competitiveness in various SMEs, for the preparation and exploitation of the final results.

The CIP-MCI communications strategy will make use of print, multimedia and dissemination techniques such as electronic newsletters, presentations, events or workshops. As a part of dissemination and exploitation, the project will organize internal workshops to exchange the information about progress and results between the partners.

This work test the method in several thematic groups and situations, solving needs associated to the EGs. It intends to develop a concrete strategy for the dissemination of results, the establishment of strong know-how about EGs, the IST sector and the Networked organizational management, and even going further in requirements set by EU directives.

The final objective of WP-DE is to establish an interactive assessment and evaluation of the project through diverse activities. The results will be used to continuously inform the project management and the partners involved. This work defines the methodology, criteria and mechanisms for the evaluation. It includes the:

· Collection and analysis of results (comparison and contrast) by participants and evaluators from the project in line with the strategy set out in Tasks;

· Analysis of wider EU impacts.

The final objective of these works is to be able to define the best model of the supportive  process and environment transformed in digital services based on web with services of training and consulting. The question to be answered by this WP is how to help the participation of SMEs acting as groups in the process and maintain a CSR exploitation of these services in order to guarantee the process without external inputs of grants.

CONSEN as specialist has to coordinate all these works. The rest of partners as a technical definition, content provision or testing tasks. The design of this will be test and evaluated with the use and a set of questionnaires and interviews done online and in the attendants of the Work-shops.

Dissemination & Training activities (work-shops, Conferences & Seminaries)

• Dissemination activities:

Web-Portal and web-kits; Brochure, Handbook and the other digital publications;

Electronic newsletters to be distributed periodically (quarterly);

Presentation of the results in conferences and events;

The six massive Conferences and Workshops and the seminaries;

Orchestration and Partnership in FP6-RTD+I projects and initiative on-going;

Sponsors advertisements;

Training Courses.

In addition and mainly with a sustainable promotion and exploitation focused on the common aim of the CIP-MCI geographical and sectoral extension, the increase of number of groups, companies, platforms, regions, works and projects and the business generated to be reinvested in new works.

The dissemination training and consulting activities will accompany the project continuously from the beginning to the end. Within the project, it will be of crucial importance to involve all possible European representatives in the area of project interests, in the process of developing, assessing and agreeing the solutions.

In particular, the dissemination activities include:

• Project Info-Space: Direct and indirect knowledge transfer through the project Info-Space, information and communication environment, based on an dynamic Internet-space, as free content on Forums, publications, Technological and Industrial Experts Groups information and discussion, news, newsletters, tutorials, documented cases studied, web-tools and web-kits, etc.

Materials here include all documents published (academic articles, white papers, best practices), but also through a number of reports planned to be publicly accessible.

In particular the guidelines will be a good material to be widely disseminated.

• Events: Workshops, large conferences and courses organized around the core topics involved in CIP-MCI.

• Good and Best Practices: Recommendations and guidelines to support good and best practices and success cases in CIP-MCI.

• Syndication of contents: The current web and Internet technologies along with standards allow the distribute access to the web-contents.

In CIP-MCI  web-portal this can be very interesting way of dissemination not only for the partners websites with more than the typical link, with visualization of integrated content of the project.

• Knowledge transfer: CIP-MCI objectives in this area include:

1. Technology and knowledge transfer, through the Info-Space, publications, workshops, seminars and conferences, and exploitation of results by project partners in terms of new business and technology services, vocational and non vocational training content;

2. Education: see training activities below, but also practitioners and managers education, for example, through direct promotion and participation in project activities;

3. Promoting the adoption of the best available practices in CIP-MCI  solutions and development processes.

Anticipated topics include but are not limited to (1) CIP-MCI model concepts and protocols, (2)  CIP-MCI management practices, (3) CIP-MCI economic effects and spillover

• Policy recommendations: Another analytical objective for CIP-MCI is to detect critical factors and give technical examples, arguments and support to policy makers to help justify, explain and manage the CIP-MCI.

• Training Activities: The first steps for CIP-MCI are to establish an explanation and training plan, adapted to different local and national end-user requirements. This creates the basis of the initial studies where training needs will be identified, especially for CIP-MCI experts and  managers as facilitators for CIP-MCI use and practice adoption.

CIP-MCI main activities of the dissemination tasks include:

· Usage of the results to create demos that help to transfer the technology with other partners and related projects, in workshops, in other applications for SMEs;

· Exploitation by each partner of his own mechanism to transfer within its own organization and outside;

· Organization of Workshops to demonstrate the use of CIP-MCI technology, e.g. by analyzing market opportunities as service provider;

· Definition of the exploitation strategy with concrete tasks, time schedules and success criteria;

· Implementation of the agreed strategy and evaluation of the success by using the success criteria.

The CIP-MCI inputs will be used to refine the exploitation strategy:

· Attempt to commercialize the use of CIP-MCI technology for providing services or applications;

· Raise future funds nationally and internationally.

Furthermore the exploitation task aims to:

· Operate in an online environment, using the web-portal to provide discussion lists, courses, tutorials, supporting initiatives, promotion of ASP services, publishing, offers, contributions, to a wide range of states, languages and organisations.

The progress of the CIP-MCI, especially outcomes of current research work, will be published in international and national journals either in printed or electronic form.

Different levels of dissemination used also for the understanding of the user needs and systematically questionnaires will be broadcast. will be addressed:

· This on-line environment will be

· Create, maintain and exploit a network of relations (authorities, NGOs, communities of users, professionals, providers, operators, etc), which are needed for the further viability.

· Develop a set of experimental on-line communities (collaborative spaces) for the access to innovation and its on-line experimentation.

· Produce specifications related to incentives for collaboration. Design the Info-Space in such a manner that there will be strong incentives for every participant to contribute in a manner that is strongly beneficial to others. (If too many participants of what is intended to be a platform for collaboration think that they can get the benefit without making significant contributions, collaboration isn't going to happen.)

The Training activities include:

· Creation of training and vocational educational materials, as “Handbook: guide and teacher kit” or “European Groups: Manual of surveillance”

· Establishing online based courses, presence based seminaries and “merged” courses

· Local training events

The main outputs at this stage are: The webportal; The Tutoring digital services and The Annual Conferences

During the post funding period, at the end of the project, has to follow with the dissemination action, important to give sustainability to the CIP-MCI  project. The sustainability will be in base on two main Info-Space proprieties: self-growth and profit production. The profit production means the CSR exploitation of the Info-Space with different activities, i.e. To provide instruments for EGs on-Net partners and recipients to easily build their own on-line courses by means of an education-oriented CMS hosted by the web-portal.

The didactic units produced would be collected into a shared public repository, that would hopefully keep increasing the knowledge base beyond the duration of the project. Partners provide the web systems, training on the use of the systems, tutoring on online courses and consultancy on didactic units building.

This objective is reached with a CSR Exploitation activities based on: Specific courses for training, Seminaries, Events Sponsorships; etc.

The exploitation is based on knowledge leverage: exploiting the knowledge generated by the own-self project for commercial and non-for-profit activities outside the project. The open availability of the research data will create openings for new enterprises and initiatives (including, of course, projects) to provide organisational consulting (applying the Model), technology solutions (products, services and development), knowledge management services (economic studies, benchmarking, quality control, financial mediation, etc.), promoting awards of team-experts competitions, to generate more inputs, sponsorships and society awareness; etc.

These exploitation activities will first be directly undertaken by the project partners in similar local and wider area initiatives: commercial offerings related to formation, Model based business process re-engineering among local industry, services and public administration. In the following stage, this can be multiplied/split by those organisations involved in the project pilots. Finally, spin-offs from the pilots can replicate these exploitation activities, like a ripple spreading across a pool.

The material and activities contained within the courses should provide profits to maintain a sustainable and reasonable exploitation of the Info-space.

The next step, important to give sustainability to the CIP-MCI project. The sustainability will be in base on two main Info-Space proprieties: self-growth and profit production.

The profit production means the CSR exploitation of the Info-Space with different activities:

One is to provide instruments for CIP-MCI partners and recipients to easily build their own on-line courses by means of an education-oriented CMS hosted by the web-portal.

The didactic units produced would be collected into a shared public repository, that would hopefully keep increasing the knowledge base beyond the duration of the project. CONSEN provide the multi-lingual web systems, training on the use of the systems, tutoring on online courses and consultancy on didactic units building.

WP-PM Network Coordination, project Management and Administration

It includes all the activities related to the management and control of the project, conflicts resolution, quality assurance, management and progress reports preparation, meetings arrangement and communication with the Commission Project Officer. This work package which runs throughout the entire project in terms of duration.

Ferran Cabrer i Vilagut is the President and Manager of CONSEN (EEIG) and CEO of MUFICATA S.L. He is Industrial Engineer and Agricultural Engineer of profession and Master in Business Administration. He managed the department of phito-pharmaceutical RTD across Spain before the petroleum world crisis. In a personal entrepreneur project opened MUFICATA s.l. a Enterprises Information and Technologic enterprises consulting in Barcelona area. The Internet was the instrument used to start International services of Corporate Finance and Merged & Acquisitions, that finally they was converted in EU information and project management services, creating CONSEN Grouping as Open Information Environment for networking at European level.

After the past four years, e-working, CONSEN (EEIG) has become, what do you know now EURO-GROUP formed by SMES IST-OS, experts in cooperating in Research and Technology Development and Innovation at European Level. Now he is contributing in diverse FP6 projects and collaborate as Vice-Chairman of the Knowledge@work community integrate in the Ambient Intelligence at work initiative of the "New Collaborative Environments" Strategic Objective and to the IQUA Agency of Internet Quality an EU Safe-Internet initiative.

Martin van Rossum C.E.O. of VRMC, his academic background originates from public & business administration and socio-economic policy, he is registered innovation professional and is holding positions as senior lecturer & research fellow at the Dutch Universities for Professional Education in The Hague & Delft. Currently he is acting as ELANET expert, head of PRELUDE Challenge Learning & Knowledge Creation Cluster for innovation and socio-economic & IST thematic EU-funded projects.

Mr.Danny Cools Vice-president of CONSEN and partner of Think Wize Ltd., he is graduated as a communication scientist at the University of Ghent in 1998, he went to UFSIA to enhance his marketing-knowledge. A recurrent objective through his professional career is the ability to make organisations more efficient by adopting information technology, in particular the Open-Source.

Nikos Bogonikolos C.E.O. Of ZEUS Consulting, received his diploma in Mathematics by the University of Patras and his MSc in Economics from the University of Kharkiv. He has co-ordinated since 1989 various European projects such as ESPRIT, Telematics Application Programme, Leonardo Da Vinci, TIDE, Brite Euram and Craft, PHARE, MED Invest etc. He has also served as CRAFT PTA for the EU, and has worked in several contracts for the European Parliament relating to Telecommunications and Information Services

Hugo Kerschot Senior Consultant for Indigov a Belgian leading company in terms of eGovernment research. He realized as Director Information of the Belgian Federal Government in 1995 the first Belgium public service website. After passing trough a number of internet start-up companies he developed for the European Commission as a Cap Gemini consultant

Andrzej Gogolewski CEO of Grupa-Antares, is M. Sc. in Computer Science, Warsaw University of Technology (1977). He has 27 years experience as Program & Project Manager, Consultant and Systems Analyst primary in IT systems for public administration and banking. Specialty - large project start-up and management.

Workpackage description

WP PM

T1 Network Management and orchestration

The Network Management task is all the telework for controlling and managing on-line the consortium, the projects, users and the information-environment. It includes the Mailings, the announcements, the publications, the promotions and also the web-hosting and application services provision for groups and users. The orchestration of internal and external initiatives and projects and CIP-MCI initiatives.