Workshops
NeIC is generally happy to fund Nordic meetings and workshops for competence sharing and strengthening collaborations. This page describes what type of workshops NeIC likes to support and (co-)fund, and what NeIC can do for you to help ensure your workshop will be successful.
If you are looking to arrange a workshop in collaboration with NeIC, you are welcome to contact the NeIC director or any member of the NeIC Executive Team, who will be happy to help you either directly themselves, or by putting you in contact with someone who is in position to take your ideas forward. Please contact NeIC if you have an idea for a workshop that you believe that NeIC could want to contribute to.
The number of workshops supported by NeIC are decided on a case by case basis by the NeIC Director and subject to the condition of available funds. Workshops that are part of this activity are separate and not related to running other NeIC activities or the affiliate programme.
Why a workshop?
NeIC likes to connect the experts who work with similar challenges in various Nordic organizations, to build networks to where expertise, experience and good solutions can be shared, and where good collaborations can be formed. Workshops are considered cost-effective endeavours to build collaborations and produce concrete results.
From NeIC's point of view return of investment is anticipated, at a very least in the form of strengthened connections between related activities in the Nordics, and an increased awareness of how similar challenges are approached in other organizations. This of course helps build trust and makes it easier to identify areas of common interest, and it makes it easier to take stock of needs and available resources. All of this greatly facilitates the formal process from idea to results-producing project work, if and when the partners want to take their collaborations to the next level. At the same time, a good workshop should also aim to produce results that are directly useful in the short term, for example in the form of concrete e-infrastructure improvements that directly serve and strengthen Nordic research.
What is a workshop?
Ideally, a good workshop should:
- have a concrete goal and agenda.
- focus on producing concrete results for an activity that is planned or already ongoing in parallel in the Nordic countries.
- allocate a lot of time to hands-on work or focused discussions.
- include opportunities for informal face-to-face discussions, as these are often essential for people to get to know each other, and build the trust that is the foundation for successful distributed teamwork.
- have a Nordic dimension and contribute to a Nordic added value as outlined in NeIC_Community_Wiki#Nordic_Added_Value.
- produce a report on attendance and results from the workshop.
NeIC workshops should not concern:
- applications for funding, for example from the Nordic research funding bodies. NeIC funds come from these organizations and should not be spent on funding applications to these same organizations.
Examples of formats:
- classic meeting with presentations, discussions and dinner.
- school for experts, combining presentations and hands-on work
- Knowledge exchange and training event
- working on specific challenges, or a competition
- plugfest putting together services and components
- hackathon
How can NeIC help you?
NeIC has put together a set of recommendations, see further below, on how to use different tools to plan, arrange and organize your workshop, so it will have a higher chance of becoming a success.
Additionally, NeIC-funded events can make use of the NeIC event management system (Indico) for organizing your event and conducting surveys afterwards as well as the shared NeIC google event calendar for dissemination. If possible NeIC will put you in contact with key people in other organizations who can further contribute to your workshop.
NeIC should be expected to participate in the workshop with a representative and to answer any questions about NeIC.
What gets funded?
Typically NeIC (co)-funds. Meeting venues and meals, travel expenses, for further information please refer to the reimbursement page. The amount for subsidising a workshop is decided on a case by case basis by the NeIC Director and subject to the condition of available funds.
Workshop tool recommendations
- Tools like the event management system Indico are useful when arranging a workshop. You can create an account on https://indico.neic.no, once you have done that one of the administrators there can give you enough rights to set up your event.
- Add a link to the training material in the invite. Online training combined with physical workshops being webinars, streaming, podcast/screencast and eLearning modules, can create awareness and interest to collect materials.
- Accessible for reuse: Use a platform (open source) to collect any produced material which can be shared and reused, e.g. GitHub, videos can be placed on YouTube or similar.
- Tips for the slides to be used in your workshop.
- NeIC can help disseminate information about your workshop, so that interested parties know about it and can register. For that purpose NeIC uses shared public calendars for training and other events to collect and disseminate information on upcoming events that are either arranged by NeIC or partners, or are of interest to NeIC and its stakeholders. The information in these public calendars can be added to your favourite calendar application to view in your phone or elsewhere. For details please refer to Training#Training_calendar and your calendar application manual.
- Collect feedback to adapt and improve: Tools like Indico are also useful for setting up surveys including a pre-survey. Feedback strengthens teaching and learning, ultimately improving the training offered and is also otherwise useful. NeIC highly encourages such feedback loops and learning from workshop surveys and sharing survey results. Indico survey results can be shared as a website view with charts and graphs of aggregate data.
Links
- Activity initiation - How to start projects with NeIC.
- Collaboration - Documentation on how NeIC likes to do collaboration.
- Contact - You are welcome to contact NeIC to discuss your ideas for a workshop.