Last week I was in Budapest,  in the event ICT Proposers’ day 2011 organized by the European Community. I had a number of meetings with Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs),  universities and National Contact Points (NCPs) that mainly helped me to understand the complexity of the FP7th.

The FP7, as you may know, is the latest research programme initiated in 2007 and ending in 2013, having a budget of over €50 billion to spend.  As I understand it, the FP7th framework has  the following objectives: cooperation, capacities, ideas and people.

The objective cooperation (€ 32,4 bn)  is meant to help researchers to build European leadership in ten key themes namely: Health, Food, Agriculture and fisheries, and biotechnology; Information and Communication technologies; Nanosciences, nanotechnologies, materials and new production technologies: Energy; Environment; Transport; Socio-economic sciences and humanities; Space and Security. The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) element is the largest theme having a budget of €9, 1bn. Capacities (€4.1bn)aims at building world class infrastructure for European researchers. Ideas (€4.5 bn) is  an autonomous Europoean Research Council destined to reinforce European science and People (4,7 bn) has the objective to strengthen the human potential of Europe research.

Each objective has specific programmes. The programme which interests me is ICT, which is by the way, the largest with a budget of €9.1bn. Within the programme (also called theme) the calls 8 and 9 are the ones I am keeping an eye open. The call 8  and 9 are within the ICT challenge 8, also called ICT for Learning and Acces to Cultural Resources.

If you are interested in call 8, please contact me with your project idea!