GENIUS teleconf T1

Doodle for date and time: http://www.doodle.com/2eeufyz7t7iczqn7

Points for discussion

Budget

  • The project is formally co-funded by the participating institutions and the UE, so you have to assign to the proposal some FTEs from permanent personnel of your institutions; that is considered co-funding.
  • The total FTEs assigned (permanent personnel and contracted personnel) should me sized to cover the intended tasks. We will have to carefully think on this.


Please discuss with your offices these points. It's not trivial how it is done.

On the other hand, when discussing the budget here we have noticed that having two contracts (1s+1j) for three years for 300,000€ may be over-optimistic (not only in the Netherlands case). Among other things, there is a part of this money retained by the institutions (overheads) and it includes all taxes, so the net amount for the contracted persons may be too low.

Please make the numbers at your institutions, but we may have to decide between several options (case by case or all together):

  1. Keep the number of contracts and duration, but accept low salaries (i.e. predoc level)
  2. Keep the number of contracts and duration, enlarge the budget to allow higher salaries but do not include 1-year contracts for additional partners
  3. Keep the number of contracts but reduce the duration of the project (i.e. to 2.5 years) to allow higher salaries.
  4. Other mixed solutions

Advice received


I have asked around to experts on FP7 for advice on how to improve our proposal. Here is a summary of the suggestions:

a) Incorporate in the proposal the use of data from other missions, related to Gaia or precursors

b) Add specific activities of data analysis, not just technology development

c) Include some non-EU partners (USA, Japan, ...)

d) Clearly explain in the proposal how the Gaia data reduction is funded (not by ESA, but by member states), so that asking for EU funding is important (not all the referees may be acquainted with this).

e) Emphasize the use of data at ESAC and (if possible) at NASA



We should avoid making the proposal a Christmas tree, but I think we can somewhat cover these points:

a) The validation will need external data, from other space missions (e.g. Hipparcos) or other astronomical catalogues. Fred, you can put emphasis in this point.

b) We can strengthen the role of the "Grand challenges" mentioned in my draft. We can make these a more central point, so that actual data analysis is more relevant in the proposal.

c) This is difficult, but we could ask the Jasmine PI for a letter of interest.

d) No problem

e) No problem for ESAC; for NASA, will be use some data from their missions?

Minutes

Agreements:

  1. The draft budget sent around by the UB European project office to the 4 main partners is accepted. A detailed budget should be defined internally with the respective European projects office and sent to the UB office ASAP.
  2. Based on the above mentioned draft budget, we can roughly afford 3 FTEs per main node. The task definitions should be sized based on this.
  3. We will work on this basis to define the budget of the rest of partners and subcontractors. With the rest of the budget we aim to include several one-year contracts for additional partners. We agree that this will strengthen the proposal by including more national diversity.
  4. By the end of the week the main WP managers will provide suggestions for additional partners tied to their WPs
  5. The order of WP 400 and 500 will be swapped.
  6. Idea of including a letter of interest from NanoJasmine accepted
Next teleconf: 3 or 4 Nov. to work on the writting of the proposal. First draft by then on the wiki.

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Topic revision: r4 - 2011-11-24 - XaviLuri
 
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