[aaloa supporters] workshop on AAL market breakthrough

[Mohammad-Reza Tazari]

Jesus Bermejo wrote on 19-May-11 09:04:
> ... there is something that is confusing for me from outside; What is
> the relationship between universAAL and a porting concept?

Hi Jesus,

[[ I thought, the answer to your question might be interesting for all 
AALOA supporters and added a CC to that list; I hope, you are OK with 
this ]]

It is true that the idea of porting projects was born in the context of 
the universAAL project and until now most of the resources for the 
organization of the workshop have been invested by the universAAL 
partners, but the AALOA governing board accepted to actively support 
this action after making sure that the door is open for other potential 
candidate platforms and even being mentioned as a candidate platform in 
the workshop does not lead to any specific status for any of them 
automatically. Let me explain more:

We assume that in each porting project, there is a platform to which a 
set of products and services (that were developed independently from 
that platform) will be ported. Local groups of the owners of those 
products and services together with one additional local organization as 
the platform expert can build consortia that submit porting project 
proposals. If such a proposal is successful and a project is 
initialized, we expect that all regional projects that share the same 
target platform are confederated at the EU level, ideally under the 
supervision of a neutral expert appointed by funding bodies. The 
corresponding projects put the selected platform under "stress test" and 
the platform must show its usefulness and "usability" in practice. At 
the end, the supervisor of the confederation must deliver a public 
evaluation report to the funding body in cooperation with the partners 
of the regional consortia (AALOA will naturally benefit from these 
reports very much in its path towards an open source AAL platform). 
Generally, proposals are free to choose the platform to put under stress 
test. An important criteria for the success of the proposals from the 
point of view of the funding bodies, however, will be the 
appropriateness of the platform chosen as the target platform in each 
proposal.

With the above understanding, Reiner Wichert talked to funding bodies 
and argumented that alone the existence of universAAL shows that it is 
justifiable to invest efforts to define a funding scheme for porting 
projects. In consultancy with eInclusion and the universAAL consortium, 
universAAL has been mentioned in the announcement text as one possible 
target platform just to make sure that there will be at least one 
appropriate platform volunteer. But in practice, until now we have 
received two other official registrations that nominate a platform, 
namely "OSAmI-Commons" and "AAS-Platform", and two other that have 
contacted us by email and are arranging for nomination of a platform, 
namely "openURC" and "Hydra/LinkSmart". This is even more than the 
number of the slots we had reserved for candidate platforms in the 
workshop and hence we have to include only a subset of them in the 45 
minutes slot. However, this does not mean that only those platforms 
presented in the workshop can be taken as target platform in the future 
proposals. In a very short presentation, the organizers will list all of 
the nominations and explain that there is no intention from the side of 
the organizers to "push" the platforms included in the program or to 
"boycott" the non-included ones. More importantly, the workshop is not 
about the selection of any platform but must discuss the feasibility of 
the idea from different perspectives:

- are there any owners of products and services that would participate 
such projects? what would be the benefits for them?
- do these projects really help to make one step towards achieving 
market breakthrough? which concrete obstacles can be cleared by them? 
(this is why we ask companies to become volunteer for short 
presentations on market obstacles)
- what do these projects mean for the candidate platforms in terms of 
additional resources needed to provide support to porting projects?
- do the funding bodies see a solution for possible funding? under which 
programs or calls?
- can the workshop at the end agree on a specific recommendation that 
can be followed up by the funding bodies?

The presentation of a small set of platforms should only help that 
companies owning (prototypes of) AAL products and services answer the 
first question positively.

Kind regards,

-- Saied