Hi Nikos,
thanks for the question!
On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 06:47:47PM +0200, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
Hello, I was made aware of the following fosdem talk about EU research funding and free software: https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/eu_research_funding/
My experience with EU projects is that it is infeasible for any small project to manage the bureaucracy required by the EU. Could FSFE assume that role? As far as I know all EU projects include funds for secretarial work, so that could be assumed by paid positions within FSFE. What do you think?
tl;dr: Participating in EU projects usually isn't an efficient way for FSFE to achieve its goals. It makes sense for FSFE only when the project is 100% aligned with what we're trying to do; and even then, the administrative overhead is a big problem. We usually don't participate in such projects unless there's a compelling reason to do so.
FSFE has participated in a few FP6 and FP7 projects, e.g. SELF and STACS. Like pretty much everybody else, we don't yet have any experience yet with Horizon 2020 [1], which started only recently.
As far as I know, there have been some updates to the various funding schemes, but they haven't fundamentally changed, so I'm assuming that Horizon 2020 works mostly in the same way as FP7 did. I'm bound to find out more shortly.
When I'm talking about "EU projects" in this mail, I'm referring to FP6 / FP7 / Horizon 2020. There's a bunch of other unrelated funding schemes that are completely different.
We are frequently approached about becoming involved in EU projects; but we rarely do. Participating in such a project only makes sense for FSFE if the project is pretty much 100% aligned with things we want to do anyway. That's rarely the case.
Under the rules of these projects, the EU pays up to 100% of the staff time for the employees participating in the project, plus an overhead rate that goes toward administrative work related to the project. (That's if you're lucky. Under a lot of schemes, you only get 75%.)
The overhead rate -- which I guess is what you refer to when you say "secretarial work" -- goes toward handling the paperwork.
And boy, is there a lot of paperwork. I hear that things are supposed to have gotten slightly better with Horizon 2020, but it's still *a lot*.
That's fine if you're working at a decent-sized university department or a company. There's usually a staffer there who handles everyone's paperwork for EU projects. But if you don't have such a person, then the paperwork will kill you.
The heaviest administrative workload is handled by the project coordinator, i.e. the leader of the consortium. When we participated in EU projects in the past, we did so as a simple partner in the consortium. That limits the paperwork somewhat, but it's still significant.
The staff time that the EU pays for can be used only for contributions to the project, both for working on the project's substance, and for administration. Otherwise taxpayers would be crying bloody murder about the abuse of public funds, and they'd be right.
In short: An EU project usually isn't an efficient way to finance our activities adn achieve our goals.
Best regards, Karsten
[1] The EC thought that "Horizon 2020" sounded sexier than "FP8".