This is very good news. I hope the kick-off meeting went well. Anything interesting to report?
Volodja (and others), I am very interesting in building a group to work on obtaining EU funding for .LRN related projects this year. With the i18n work and adoption that is taking place we should have a good chance.
If I understand it correctly both MINERVA and LINGUA or both part of the Socrates program, where the focus is on cooperation in he field of education.
I spent an hour looking through the paperwork today.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/programmes/socrates/socrates_en.html
An important piece of information:
"Please note that according to the new financial regulation applicable to the general budget of the European Communities, one project may not receive more than one grant from the budget of the European Communities to any one beneficiary. In other words, if you are to be selected to receive a Socrates grant for a given project, you must not receive a grant from another Community programme for the same project and funding period."
So we need to be careful with the dates and who is involved.
The dates I could find that are coming up that might be of interest:
March 1 2004 for the COMENIUS 2.1: Training of School Educational Staff project (the focus is secondary education if I read it correctly). Posting this one just in case anyone from the secondary education space (or higher education that is training teachers) is reading. According to the application materials the contractual period is likely to start on the first of October 2004 and the possible durations are 12, 24, and 36 months.
There is a EU-US call for proposals that will be coming out on the 31st of January that we should look at when it comes out:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/programmes/eu-usa/usa_en.html#pre
Finally, Minerva seems to be the area that is most likely to fit .LRN, but I had problems finding concrete information on that part of the website (e.g. dates and application materials for 2004)
All the programs seem to be open to member states, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Romania and Turkey.
It would be great if we could cooperatively wade through the paper work and find projects that may be of interest to people in the OpenACS community that are eligible.
