In Portugal we have a saying “não há fome que não dê em fartura”, which means (more or less) that if you wait long enough for something, you’re likely to end up with more than you can handle.
That’s certainly true for MoUs!
Over the last few months, I’ve been watching my colleagues in EGI.eu’s headquarters in Amsterdam negotiating MoU agreements with technical providers, research communities and FP7 projects. I was always hoping for the photo & quote opportunity – a dissemination officer’s idea of fun – but I was always told to wait. And wait I did.
And then on Monday, the first day of the User Forum, Steven Newhouse signed four MoUs in less than an hour. The official signing venue was our own booth, decorated with the EGI word cloud.
The MoU marathon started with the WeNMR project, represented by Alexandre Bonvin. WeNMR – a worldwide e-infrastructure for the structural biology community – thus became the first user community to be recognised as a Virtual Research Community by EGI.eu.
The next ‘victims’ were Shantenu Jha, from the SAGA project, an open source software provider, and Bernard Marechal from GISELA, a project dealing with grid initiatives for e-Science virtual communities in Europe and Latin America. Bernard also joined Catherine Gater in the ‘signing venue’ for an MoU with the e-ScienceTalk project.
The MoU stravaganza ended with Charles Loomis, who signed the agreement with Steven for StratusLab, a project developing an open source cloud distribution.
The GridCast blog was there and Corentin Chevalier took photos of the event, while I chased the signees for quotes and requests for interviews. At least four people to photograph and pester! What more can a press officer want?
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1 comment:
I was really hoping that the resource provider MoU with SAGrid could have been signed during this day as well, but we're still waiting for the lawyers. Soon, very soon :)
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