Marta Nachtmannová

Achievements

CINEFOGO has developed a well functioning infrastructure for communication of research activities and related events. This infrastructure is a central tool for the Spread of Excellence (SoE) activities. It consists of a technical and an organizational part.

Technical part consists of:

• CINEFOGO portal http://www.cinefogo.org, the virtual „home“ of the Network
• CINEFOGO Outcomes Database http://cinefogo.cuni.cz/, the on-line „library“ of the Network
• Student Corner on civil society http://www.civilsociety.se/, a thematic „crossroad“ for European students and young academics interested in civil society
• Detailed list of milestones and deliverables and their „parameters“ – the list is daily updated, based on information received from partners
• List of contacts of CINEFOGO members and stakeholders – used for targeted distribution of project news and events

Organizational part is arranged as follows:

• Cooperation of project management, SoE office and Work Package (WP) responsibles – project reporting and dissemination are interconnected.
• Events and activities announced by WP responsibles are matched to planned milestones and deliverables (management) and announced on the web (SoE).
• Related documents are carefully inserted in the project „library“ – the Outcomes Database by the SoE Office in Prague.
• Project events are also reported to IConnectEU website, a FP6 project linking networks focusing on civil society and governance. CINEFOGO has already provided detailed records on more than 120 events, publications, databases, institutions and other information. See www.iconnecteu.org.
• Further dissemination is done by SoE team. Activities are promoted through CINEFOGO own websites, half-yearly Newsletter, weekly E-letter, via related networks and projects and on important websites, such as CORDIS.

Reviewers‘ recommendations regarding dissemination

The external review report covering CINEFOGO second project year has presented a list of recommendations regarding the Network’s dissemination of information on research outcomes and events:

• The consortium should rethink its dissemination strategy, addressing the question of how to reach the three different audiences of academics, stakeholders and the general public.
• In terms of academic dissemination, the NoE should increase its efforts to produce articles in peer reviewed journals and also consider introducing one or more working paper series.
• The NoE should carefully and explicitly define the target groups outside academia which it wants to reach and then concentrate its efforts on them. This would be more effective than e.g. public lectures which may have a limited effect.
• The consortium could consider a dedicated Stakeholders Corner website along the lines of the excellent “Students’ Corner”.
• The SoE should maintain and extend the websites and in the case of the outcomes data base, consider ways of making it more user friendly.
• There should be a major rethink concerning the access policy on the outcomes website, with consortium-only material reduced to an absolute minimum.

All recommendations have been carefully considered since the review report was published, and will be taken into account during the remaining project period.

Guidelines for May 2008 – August 2009 (and beyond)

Getting information from WPs is a nesessary, but not sufficient pre-requisit for further dissemination and reporting. Therefore there is an increased need for timely and accurate reporting. Communication and documentation of CINEFOGO activities got improved in 2007-2008. All project news and updates are published at http://www.cinefogo.org, this site is accompanied by virtual project „library“, the Outcomes Database http://cinefogo.cuni.cz/, and the Student Corner on Civil Society, http://www.civilsociety.se/. There is still rather large space to improve CINEFOGO inner information flows. It is essential to work with information which is complete, accurate, consistent and delivered timely.

CINEFOGO is supposed to communicate to other groups than just academia. Target groups were recalled several times – e.g. in Review Report by the Commission last year, in CINEFOGO Guidelines for targeted communication available at http://cinefogo.cuni.cz/getfile.php?&id_file=63 and more in detail in target group definition available at http://cinefogo.cuni.cz/getfile.php?&id_file=64. It it also easy to quickly understand what groups should get actively involved - check http://ec.europa.eu/research/index.cfm, the official website of DG Reasearch and you get immediately an idea (not only) of target groups – content of the website is „individualized“ for Researchers, Journalists, Students, Teachers, NGOs, Policy makers, Business and General public.

At least some CINEFOGO events should be open for others than just researchers and students. Other target groups should be kept in mind from  the very beginning of planning of an event. Active participation and involvement of other than academic audiences is not made by stating „This academic event is open“ in event invitation. Events cannot be just „allowed“ to other groups, they must be made for them from the very beginning, there must offer something useful and attractive for them.

CINEFOGO should produce more press releases. Recently a press release on Women’s citizeship in Europe, based on a WP36 conference, was published on CORDIS Wire. See http://cordis.europa.eu/wire/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.Detail&rcn=17333. SoE office can assist you with writing and publishing a press release to promote your activities beyond academia.

CINEFOGO was selected among other project proposals because it promised to generate and share knowledge not only within academia, but also between researchers and „users“ of research findings. This explains the need for policy briefs – short, structured and practice-oriented documents on CINEFOGO activities. Policy brief template is available at http://cinefogo.cuni.cz/getfile.php?&id_file=642. These policy briefs are becoming mandatory for all SSH projects and the Commission is looking for policy briefs with good layout, text and information graphics to make information accessible to a large audience.

CINEFOGO needs to report all its publications. All CINEFOGO members are kindly asked to provide CINEFOGO Secretariat with information on published articles, chapters, conference proceedeings and other texts on CINEFOGO themes, published or accepted for publication since 2005.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) are an issue even for social science and humanities. It is understandable that an article submitted to or published in a journal should not be available in CINEFOGO website or Outcomes Database. But since CINEFOGO is financed by public funds and since one of the main goals of CINEFOGO is to make knowledge available and support debate, the default general communication policy of CINEFOGO is that everything goes public. Even an article submitted for publication must be made available by publishing its abstract and expected/real conditions of its publication.

Two final conferences of CINEFOGO planned for 2009 are essential SoE events. Design, promotion and realization of these events must take into account all general target groups of CINEFOGO.

Three guiding themes of CINEFOGO (Identities, Values and Civic Culture; Civic Participation and Social Protection; Multilevel Governance and Civil Society) could be disseminated by converting some of the texts produced for CINEFOGO events into working papers published in three thematic series.

One or two more TRANSAACT trainings on research communication can be prepared under the conditions that there will be a reasonable amount of interested CINEFOGO participants and that these participants will actively contribute to CINEFOGO dissemination of material from their respective work package activities.