FORCES Project - Management Committee Minutes 21/04/98
The meeting was held at the University of Stirling with the participation of:
Action points arising from meetings are identified as AP/meeting/action/owner. This meeting was number 0.
AP/0/1/KT It was agreed that K. Turner should propose a start date of 01/09/98 to the rest of the project and, if approved, to EPSRC.
AP/0/2/KT It was agreed to have a simple logo based on the project name; some possibilities will be mocked up based on the suggestions discussed.
AP/0/3/RB&HL&DM The contacts for Glasgow, Stirling and Strathclyde are M. Thomas, K. Turner and E. Magill. BT, Ericsson and CITEL should nominate their contact persons.
AP/0/4/KT It was agreed that web pages should be the primary means of distributing project information. These should point to documents on partner sites as required rather than trying to hold everything centrally. Private project documents (such as minutes and internal reports) will be available via username/password.
AP/0/5/ALL Partners can set up collections of pages (e.g. on their local work or a subject of interest to them) that can be referenced from the main pages.
AP/0/6/KT&ALL K. Turner will merge and unify bibliography entries on service creation and engineering for a central page. All partners are asked to contribute entries in whatever form, including URLs for documents that can be referenced.
AP/0/7/EM It was agreed that some of the project workshop/colloquium budget should be used to prepare a good quality `flier'. One of the industrial partners may be able to offer printing services for this.
AP/0/8/MT It was agreed that it would be worthwhile to prepare an initial announcement to be published in Software Echo.
Unless a specific necessity arises, it is not intended to have a project-wide collaboration agreement or non-disclosure agreement. These will be agreed between partners as required on a 1:1 basis.
AP/0/9/KT Stirling should send a letter to each partner entitled to a share of the project budget (SMEs, Universities). This should state the project start and end dates, the partner budget under each heading and who should receive invoices. To make it official it should be countersigned by a Stirling financial officer.
Partners can then invoice Stirling quarterly for one-twelfth of their budget and without details of expenditure. K. Turner will simply pass this to the Stirling Finance Office for payment. Stirling will maintain a separate account for each SME and University.
It was agreed that it would be sensible to invite potential new partners to the first project workshop, planned for early September 1998. (Some financial support could be offered from the workshop budget.) Stirling and Burgess Hill were suggested as possible venues for this. Invited parties would be asked to give some presentation of their work and interests. Based on this, the existing consortium would consider a formal invitation to join the project. In principle the size of the consortium is not restricted, but there is limited budget for new partners (two SMEs, two Universities).
AP/0/10/DM Atlantech was mentioned as a possible new SME. It was suggested that CITEL might have some ideas for new SME partners.
AP/0/11/MT It was suggested that Scottish Enterprise might also be approached by M. Thomas for suggestions.
In general the project should have an even distribution of meetings over sites (though this will not be arithmetically enforced!). Since there are three academic partners in Central Scotland, there are pragmatic reasons to have a number of meetings in this area. However, the geographical weight of relevant companies is in the South East of England. To attract industrial interest it is therefore expected that a number of meetings will be held in the London area. The industrial partners may be able to help with meeting facilities there.
The distributed nature of the project means that meetings are likely to have only a subset of the partners. For this reason, formal minutes will be taken and made available via the web (to consortium members). By convention, the meeting host will take the minutes. Minutes will not be formally approved, though partners will be notified that minutes have been posted and be asked to report any corrections within a reasonable time.
It is proposed to use mainly email and the telephone for communication (specifically, not to circulate paper documents). It is proposed to use email mainly for notification, i.e. to report a URL of some document rather than trying to circulate (large) documents by email.
K. Turner reported his initial investigations of video-conferencing (which is available at least at Glasgow, Stirling and Strathclyde). It is not yet known if this can be used to communicate with other partners (industrial or Universities outside Scotland). Video-conferencing would offer little to the current Scottish partners, but may be useful later with more distant partners. No one seems to have good experience of using CuSeeMe and the like over the Internet. Perhaps CITEL have some suggestions?
AP/0/12/ALL It is not anticipated that much documentation will be generated by the project per se. Where necessary, documents will be numbered by each partner as FORCES/Partner/Number. By default, documents will be regarded as confidential unless marked as public. Any documents should be clearly marked as to their status (under development, final, project confidential, public, etc.).
Assuming a September start, the project annual Colloquium (open to non-project members) could take place in late June or early July. The project budget can be used to fund the attendance of external speakers (possibly from overseas). At the first project workshop in September, a programme committee should be set up to decide the details of the colloquium.
The project definition already indicates methods of working, activities and expected outcomes. It was agreed that the discussion during this meeting had filled in most of the required details.
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