aRTes Biannual Newsletter #1

1-MADRID JUNE EVENT - DATES

We already have the final date for Madrid aRTes event in June, voted by 90% of you

It will be June 26-27 with extension to Saturday 28th for those who want to extend the travel to the weekend and accept to participate in some open activities outside the core ones on 26-27.

With your informed number of participants we are arranging the logistics and closing some agreement with some hotel, in case you want to use that option for your stay

If you have some changes, let us know to make adjustments.

2-NATIONAL AGENCIES LATE FUNDING

We are experiencing a high negative impact as we have 3 out of 7 agencies who have not yet solved the funding to 4 of our partners (UAveiro, TeamDev, R2M and InfoDim).

We are in March, the fourth month of the project, what represent a 10% of the time of the overall 36 months project. And this delay is seriously impacting our overall aRTes project and we have 4 partners almost blocked for any result, what affect the other 4 funded partners (UPM, ECO, RSS and UCY) in different WPs and Tasks.

Ester will e-mail DUT secretariat this week copying the 3 agencies and each of our impacted partners to declare this serious issue next week. If UAveiro, TeamDev, R2M and InfoDim can share the current status of this important issue to Ester and me we will act accordingly.

3-NON FUNDED PARTNERS (Blokgarden and VisualUrb)

We want to share with you that last Friday, both, Blokgarden and VisualUrb, applied to Ramboll Foundation, the owner of Ramboll Group A/S, the large Danish architecture, engineering and consulting company with presence in 35 countries with +18.000 employees. I made the contact with 2 board members of the Foundation presenting aRTes a week ago, and they simply loved the project in a meeting with Ramboll innovation leader, Ester, Erwin (as Ecometro helped me to make the Linkedin connection with Ramboll), Tuomas and myself, and they signed a recommendation letter to support the 2 applications. The funding result will be earlier than 30 days, so we are confident to have a positive and quick return, to have the 2 partners back to the consortium, acting as cooperation partners if the aRTes Executive Committee or General Assembly accept them back. This is not the only way we are working to have them back, but it is a solid one that we want to share with all of you.

4-WORK EVOLUTION

The first 4 weeks status is that we are clearly moving forward, nothing impressive, but we are evolving on every WPs.

On WP1 we have some small evolution with UPM delivery on T1.3, and UCY is doing great in their team hiring, with one resource just onboarded, Welcome Michelis!!. Meetings #2 have been scheduled.

On WP2 we have again some very preliminary first deliveries of State of the Art by UPM on T2.2 and T2.3 and RSS is waiting for some provider input on T2.4. Meetings #2 have been attended (T2.2) or scheduled (T2.3 and T2.4). We have a great impact on T2.5, as UAveiro can move forward without their national agency funding result.

On WP3 UPM has delivered the first functionalities and basic designs for T3.2 and T3.3, and TeamDev has analyzed and evolved on T3.2 and scheduled Meetings #2 for T3.3 doubts. And R2M role/scope in T3.3 is being defined, as the Proposal writing was not too clear.

On WP4 we have the first draft of T5.3 by Pablo Morera and waiting for the second release with more detail of the task and WP soon.

On WP5 with Blokgarden provable return we will be able to start this WPs in April-May with the University of Helsinki pilot project. Other options have been appointed by TeamDev with some current software solution and a green Italian partner I introduced in Proposal phase, Orti Alti. If we did not manage to retain Blokgarden we will explore additional options.