EURON 3 Documents

Board Meeting Minutes, 28th March 2008, Prague

Present: John Hallam (JH), Juha Roning (JR), Angel P. del Pobil (ADP), Annibal Ollero (AO), Fabio Bonsignorio (FB), Herman Bruyninckx (HB, reporter) Absent: Jean-Pierre Merlet (JPM), Paolo Fiorini (PF), Jon Agirre Ibarbia (JAI)

This was the first face-to-face meeting of the newly elected EURON Board. The agenda of the meeting was to discuss a short-term roadmap with concrete suggestions for activities in the new EURON, and to distribute this among the members within three weeks, in order to guarantee a smooth transition from old to new EURON.

The following items were discussed:
  • 1.  next plenary EURON meetings
  • 2.  short term priorities and programme
  • 3.  peer assessment policy --- EURON Credit System
  • 4.  membership policy
  • 5.  improve dynamic and fair community involment
  • 6.  electronic paper archive
  • 7.  legal entity

1. Next plenary EURON meetings. The Board agrees with JPM's suggestion to host a EURON meeting collocated with IROS in September 2008. This meeting will be a "Progress Review Meeting", during which members can discuss the activities started and planned by the Board, and can take part in the decision making about improvements and/or new activities.

The Board agrees with HB's suggestion to host a 2-day 2009 Annual Meeting in Leuven, around the end of March as in previous years. This is a "fall back" offer, which can be replaced by concrete suggestions of motivated members.

2.  Short term priorities and programme. The important things to continue without any discontinuity are: the PhD schools, the Georges Giralt PhD Award, the Tech Transfer Award, the Annual Meeting, the web site and the SIGs. The approach is simple, and relatively light-weight, except maybe for the web site.

  2.1.  PhD Schools. The schools have gained respect worldwide, and the Board should install a policy to maintain and even improve that respect. This shall be achieved by deciding about PhD Schools no longer on a purely ad hoc, season by season basis, but with an inter-school vision and consistency over a time horizon of about 5 years: topics are suggested via community consultation, but the Board decides which Schools will receive a EURON accreditation stamp. This accreditation will be given by a EURON PhD School Committee, whose members serve a (for example) 5 year term, with yearly renewal of 1/5th of the members. This PhD School Committee makes fair, efficient and transparant criteria to evaluate the Schools, and to give the EURON member organizing PhD Schools appropriate credits.

  2.2.  Georges Giralt PhD Award. The current procedure is kept unchanged, except maybe from the monetary award (which has never been the key motivator anyway). The Georges Giralt PhD Award Committee will be organised in the same way as the PhD School Committee.

  2.3.  Tech Transfer Award. As above, for all EURON responsibilities in this Award.

  2.4.  Annual Meeting. As above. Having a longer term view will improve continuity, community visibility and recognition.

  2.5.  Special Interest Groups. As above. With the important exception that no financial support will be available anymore for participation; the motivation to participate should come from the credits that members can earn (see EURON Credit System below).

  2.6.  Web site. As above. The hosting of the web site should be made robust by mirroring over several member hosting sites. Dynamic member involvement (see below) is expected to be an appropriate means to solve concrete technical development and maintenance issues.

3.  Peer assessment policy --- EURON Credit System. The Board decided to let EURON adopt a "peer recognition and peer assessment" policy for its activities. We all know already very well such a policy from our academic research, where it has proven to work, at no monetary cost. The implementation follows closely the "peer review" model behind scientific publication:
  (i) members doing work in EURON activities is equivalent for them to having a paper published, so it gives the member a certain amount of credits.
  (ii) the Board installs Review Committees ("Editorial Boards") to assess each set of activities: members volunteer for, and are elected to, these Committees (typically during the Annual Meeting), and they get credits for their work, including for the overhead work done in keeping the credit system operational.

This EURON Credit System (ECS) is expected to motivate EURON members because of the increased visibility and recognition by the peers within the network. If all EURON members agree with this ECS (which the Board expects to happen), we can use it in our CVs and in our national evaluation procedures as an internationally established, neutral and transparant evaluation system. And that in itself will become a key motivation for institutes to join EURON, and a key asset for EURON to maintain a high quality standard.

The Board has the responsibility for guaranteeing the fair and efficient implementation of the ECS concept: each credit should stand for a reviewed piece of work of more or less equal community value and would require more or less equal effort to be obtained, and the review committee should work transparantly and be put under the regular evaluation by the community. For example, the Annual Meeting could be used to organize a discussion and a vote about (i) what activities are put into (or removed from) the ECS; (ii) what are the credit values of each piece of evaluated work, and (iii) which members will serve in the various ECS Review Committees.

The Board has the responsibility to do the ECS bookkeeping in a professional way, and to make the results public. The database infrastructure has to be professional and robust, taking into account the high importance of the ECS scores for the EURON members.

4.  Membership policy. The Board decided to keep the policy of accepting only institutes as members.

The Board decided to take over all existing members from the current EURON without re-application overhead, but to provide the opportunity to members to opt out, or to reorganize themselves. For example, to allow multiple research groups in one single current legal member entity to become separate members.

The Board must still decide on a deadline after which new member applications, or member re-organisations, will be accepted. The Board sees no need to try to put a constraint on the maximum number of people in a member institute.

The Board will however apply damping to the possible avalanche of breaking up members into smaller units: a fixed maximum number of applications will be processed per month; new memberships take precedence over re-organising members; and the Board uses its ECS to tune membership re-organisation into a self-organizing dynamic system: each EURON member must earn a minimum amount of credits averaged over a period of, say, three years, so making member groups smaller increases the load for each individual in this group.

The Board still has to decide about the amount of credits required for each member.

The Board suggests the following minimum commitment for each member:
 - yearly update of web presence within EURON website.
 - to send a representative to the Annual Meeting at least two out of every three years.
 - to provide a poster presentation at each Annual Meeting.

In order to facilitate attending Annual Meetings, the Board strongly suggests organizers provide sufficient low-cost boarding, e.g., student dormitories.

5.  To improve dynamic and fair community involment. The previous EURON Board and Work Package management were too static, and led to a loss of activity and efficiency. The new EURON is not bound by legal contracts with the EC, which gives it the opportunity to solicit short-term, focused contributions from members (compensated with ECS credits). Many members have expressed their willingness to take up such activities, so the Board expects to be able to realise this strategy.

6.  Electronic paper archive. JH and HB will look into how EURON can host and provide an electronic archive in which members can put their research papers, make them visible online via browsing and searching. Successful precedents are the archives in physics (X-archive) and `computer science' (SiteSeer). Such a repository would be a unique asset of the network, and hence another motivating factor for members to join. The software backend should be stable over decades, and be mirrored in several places for robustness.

7.  Legal entity. The idea of establishing a legal entity ("society") was discussed, with EU-nited as a concrete potential partner to associate with. The advantages are: EU-nited has already an administration, so EURON could enter at "marginal costs"; EU-nited has already the connections to the EC. The disadvantages are: we should first be sure why we need a legal entity, and why EU-nited would be the best choice; EU-nited is not yet prepared to accept a network such as EURON within its current organisational structure. The Board decided not to pursue this option as a high priority action, but to suggest a Call for Participation in order to find motivated members with expertise in the domain of internationally operating societies.