Untitled CONCLUSION

Conclusion

The ‘FIDIS Doctoral Consortium’ is an important integrative and disseminative part of the Network: It connects students and researchers from the disparate FIDIS domains together, fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and is an important platform for networking. Indeed being a heterogeneous environment, the DC meetings are a unique opportunity to exchange ideas and build a true research network. Establishing long-term links, i.e. beyond the life-time of the NoE, between partners is key to ameliorating the research fragmentation issues both at a fundamental level across disciplines and at the broader level across Europe, and as such these events are clearly of high value. Indeed there are several instances whereby participants have continued to work together beyond the event, and in some cases this has produced published work. It is hoped that these links forged will continue to thrive throughout and beyond the FIDIS project.

Within the last Workplan period, WP15 has held a successful Doctorial Consortium event on the topic of e-Government and e-Business. Feedback from the participants has been good, although it is acknowledged that a shift in thinking is needed at this stage in the FIDIS project’s lifetime with regard to the DC events. This is especially because few new students have joined the network, and existing students are becoming increasingly time pressured as their studies move toward completion. While the given objective was to hold one or two DC events during this period, in addition within this Workplan we have diversified in order to encourage students to attend other more established events, while enhancing them through additional activities where possible. In this case, it has been through the Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2008 symposium, whereby less mature work from a range of disciplines was sought for presentation and discussion during the event and discount registration was offered, and the upcoming larger DC event which, given its popularity, has been extended through combining resources to include more activities then originally envisaged.

For the continued work of this Workpackage, consideration must be given to the fact that WP15 is a Workpackage with notably fewer resources than all others within FIDIS, and that in the final phase of the FIDIS project the resource allocation across the board will be scaled back. The net result of this is that although there has been a progression in the evolution of the events held within WP15, this will be less reflected in the 5th Workplan in which only one final additional DC event (D15.6) is envisaged which in any case will take a different format. The emphasis on this event will be on ways to keep the network of students in contact and productive after the end of the FIDIS project such that collaboration can continue to evolve. This is especially true for cross-discipline activities which have begun to flourish as a result of the success of activities to date.