News & Events

In the area of e-Infrastructure R&D, the importance of international cooperation cannot be underestimated. This includes both Africa/EU collaboration projects – which are key in maximizing the exploitation potential of EU and African developments – and African cross-continental collaboration – as a way of sharing tailored, locally adapted solutions with high socio-economic impact. It is imperative, therefore, that European and African CoPs collaborate, similar to the twinning between established and emerging NRENs organised by TERENA.

• Promotion of international collaboration opportunities must be continued and strengthened. It was noted that in many cases, African communities were not aware of the funding programmes (e.g. H2020) and collaboration opportunities that exist. The EGI Applications Database lists about 50 VOs, which members of the CoPs identified within eI4Africa could potentially engage with and work collaboratively and/or share resources within common disciplines. Additionally, the eI4Africa Project Wall provides a number of current or proposed projects and can help to notify the international community of proposers of the available collaboration opportunities, as well as facilitate knowledge exchange, VRC development, and capacity building;
• Collaboration starts with human networking. Building international (including EU-Africa) cooperation networks is an important step towards collaboration, as was demonstrated by the eI4Africa events, which have provided ideal forums for meeting peers and potential partners. Networking opportunities are the first step for further collaboration, including joint academic papers or joint proposals for funding;
• Efforts should be made to raise awareness of current efforts and initiatives, which constitutes a major gap in the uptake of e-Infrastructures in the continent. The need to promote e-Infrastructures development in Africa is especially important towards user communities, scientific communities, and e-Infrastructure developers;
• Africa/EU e-Infrastructure Coordination and Support Action (CSA) projects should continue to be funded, since they provide for essential networking and information exchange opportunities between African and European researchers and policy makers;

According to an article published on Science|Business, sharing research results through open access to publications and data is a key priority for EU says EU Commissioner for research Máire Geoghegan-Quinn

iMENTORS has partnered up with FTTH Council Africa. They agreed to work together to support cooperation in research, high speed fibre connectivity, infrastructure and Africa.

iMENTORS and FTTH Council Africa will collaborate regarding dissemination (sharing of information, events, social media, etc). For example, FTTH Council Africa has included an article about iMENTORS in their newsletter and also published the partnership in their annual report.

Moreover, iMENTORS and FTTH Council Africa will maintain an informal consultation channel to discuss best practise frameworks that is in the best interest of all stakeholders.

The next e-IRG Workshop under the Greek EU Presidency of the European Union will take place in Athens, Greece from Monday 9th until Tuesday 10th of June.

-- Registration is now open! --

The workshop will address important topics related to the e-Infrastructure Commons, data management, user aspects, and future e-Infrastructures.
The keynote in the opening session will be on the e-Infrastructure policy of the European Commission. The four plenary tracks are:

Yannick Legré was recently appointed director of EGI.eu, which coordinates and manages the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). iSGTW speaks to Legré about his vision for the organization, as well as the challenges it faces, ahead of next month’s EGI Community Forum in Helsinki, Finland.

You’ve been involved in grid computing in Europe for over a decade now. Could you tell the iSGTW readers about this?

I worked with the DataGrid project right from the beginning.  My work was concerned with integrating the different components produced by the project and ensuring that they were appropriate for the communities served. I also started playing with the Globus toolkitback when it was still at version 1.1 or 1.2, so a very early stage.

According to an article published on isgtw, in industry, and with small businesses in particular, it is now common for companies to outsource large amounts of their essential information technology tasks to third party providers. To increase efficiency, cut costs, and streamline their businesses, companies are willing to collaborate and hand over their not-so-core competencies in exchange for the infrastructure, expertise, and support of third-party providers.

iMENTORS (also funded under FP7) has been busy recording the IST-Africa project and related FP7 projects. iMENTORS enables organizations to connect with each other, share resources and link their ICT4D project proposal to the past or on-going projects.