COST grant to support OpenMod activities

Dear all,

As discussed during the last workshop in Zurich, we plan to apply for COST funding to support OpenMod conferences and networking activities.

You will find a short Overview of
I. the COST Grant,
II. the Grant Application Process,
III. Instructions for joining and
IV. FAQ below.

I. Overview of the COST Grant
In a nutshell, the COST program provides on average 130k€/year for the duration of approximately 4 years to fund networking activities among European researchers.

The COST grant would fund the following expenses types (Vademecum, Sections 5-8):
• accomodation (up to € 120 / night)
• meals (up to € 20 / meal)
• transport (air: up to € 1200 / ticket; train: all; car: up to 2000 km @€0.2-0.3/km)
• grant administration (up to 15%, about ~€ 20k/y)
• local organisation (up to € 20 / participant and € 5k / event… or € 10k / event with receipts)
• …

The COST grant would fund the following meeting types :
• administrative meetings, work-group meetings, conferences (see above)
• training schools (trainers: as above; trainees: up to € 1.5k /trainee, € 160 / night)
• short-term scientific missions (up to € 3.5k /trainee, € 160 / night)
• …

The COST grant would NOT fund :
• preparation of conferences and trainings
• research itself

A short summary of how cost works can be found here.

Official documents and rules which describe the functioning of COST can be found here. The most important ones are:
• COST Grant-Agreement
• Cost-Vademecum
• Rules for participation and implementation

II. Grant Application Process
The next deadline for proposing a COST action is 5th September 2019.

By that date, we would need to submit the following documents:
General Features of the application
Technical Annex of the Grant Agreement (see this example for inspiration)
Cost Policies section (max 1000 words)
• Network of institutions that apply for the COST grant

III. How to join:
In order to join the grant application team, please:

  1. Read this short summary of the current application.
  2. Contact me at winc_[at]_zhaw.ch so I can send you an invite through e-cost: Please note that to increase our chances of obtaining the funding, we will only add partners to the proposal who are from countries and back-ground we are still missing.
  3. Read the technical annex: any comments, edits and suggestions on the text are very welcome, as this is very much work in progress
  4. Describe your intended contributions: we use this feedback to evaluate, whether our work-plan is realistic, as the grant would only pay for networking, but not the research itself; your data will only be shared with the grant application team.

To maximize our chances of success, please try to invite people from backgrounds that are under-represented in this overview. In particular, we should not register more than 4 researchers per country!

IV. FAQ:

  1. What is (and isn’t) the role of the COST grant?

COST will provide funding for conferences (travel, accommodation, meals, room booking etc.); training schools; scientific exchanges etc.
COST will not provide funding to carry out the actual research (this is why they will not hold us accountable if the work plan was not fully achieved)

  1. Is there a problem with Double funding?

To our knowledge no, since COST only covers travel + networking expenses.

  1. Can people be funded that are not part of the “grant application and management team”?

Absolutely yes.

  1. Is the time for preparing workshops funded?

Unfortunately no; the funding only includes the direct travel, accommodation, room booking and meal expenses (?) (tbc: we need to check in more detail in the COST vademecum)

  1. Are countries outside Europe eligible?

mainly EuropeanEU countries. Near-neighbouring countries and a few international countries should be included. There are some special rules for those, but it is necessary to have them on-board + Turkey, Israel…

  1. Do participants have to be from Target inclusiveness countries?

Min 5 COST countries, 3 of which from COST target countries

  1. According to COST rules, 50% of funding should go to Target Inclusiveness Countries. Does this mean, some conference participants may not receive funding?

At least 50% of the actual expense should be spent to the benefit of ITC. In practical term, the COST association considers “at the benefit of ITC” any expense which is related to:

  • Reimbursements of Action participants from ITC
  • All costs of meetings and Training schools organised in an ITC
  • Any stsm which is involves an ITC (as home or host country)
  • All ITC Conference Grants
  1. Do we need to offer summer schools, even though we are not re-imbursed for the preparation time?

It will be up to the grant management team to decide whether / how many summer schools should be supported.
In practice, we do not expect this to be a problem, as some of the open source models are already now organising trainings to build up their user community.
The COST grant could thus be used to support these activities and facilitate further workshops.

Hello @Christian.winzer A few quick thoughts (admittedly without having contacted potentially affected parties or having read the COST documentation properly):

Applicant. The grant holder (GH) needs to be a legal entity (Vademecum:3.1.1). Which gives rise to the idea forming a verein (a voluntary association registered under German law) with the sole purpose of managing such matters. Its charter would necessarily need to be limited to applying for and managing grants to support open energy system modeling and perhaps also taking responsibility for some or all our openmod online services. It is unlikely but not impossible that such a verein could be formed within four months to coincide with the COST application deadline. Moreover the Vademecum wording implies that the GH is an academic institution rather than a verein, but that does not of course rule out a verein. I must say I remain somewhat ambivalent about this route, while noting the potential funding from COST is very substantial.

Funded activities. Some suggestions for discussion:

  • supporting or even adopting the discussion server
  • shifting the mailing list to GNU Mailman
  • running and provisioning a versioned file server running Nextcloud
  • establishing a LibreOffice online (LOOL) server (instead of relying on google docs)
  • improving statutory (GDPR, TMG) compliance on openmod platforms, also article 13 obligations should this provision pass
  • developing (to the extent this is not research) and propagating knowledge on the legal aspects of open code and data, including copyright, database rights, and licensing
  • training related to data, including OKI frictionless data packages
  • training related to software engineering and good practice
  • tackling diversity, including but not limited to gender, EU country inclusiveness (as specified by COST), and possibly extending this to non-aligned countries globally
  • public outreach (various forms) as allowed

Note that COST supports website development, hosting, and maintenance in relation to publicity (Vademecum:10.2) but not translation services (Vademecum:10.5.5). While physical meetings and academic exchanges are prominent in the COST documentation, I have chosen to highlight our virtual meeting places instead. Hope this helps.

Hello @robbie.morrison

Thank you a lot for your suggestions, which are very welcome :slight_smile: !

I have added the ideas regarding funded activities to our collection of research ideas… (which I have now re-labelled as “workstreams”, to indicate that it may contain both research topics, and admin activities).

Personally, my first concern at this point would be to identify the group of people, who would be willing to invest the time to manage the COST grant (write the proposal, process expenses claims, reports etc) by end of August…

> If you have the time, please forward our invitation to join the COST network to suitable contacts (in particular from Target Inclusiveness Countries).

Once enough people have registered, we can decide about how we want to organise ourselves (whether as “Verein”, or just the standard COST approach of a research institution (which is acting as grant holder), supported by an international network of volunteers (which are acting as a management committee).
The amount of admin support we can offer also dependends on the same criterion: the more people are willing to dedicate their time to setting up these services (and maintaining them as webmaster), the more support we can offer. If on the other hand there is just a small group of people, the priority would probably be the core processes of simply managing the COST grant.

I will write a short email in parallel to that to an appropriate COST contact person, in order to verify, whether the registration of a Verein would be possible – in particular with regards to FAQ 7 above, as well as requirements regarding “The financial stability and medium term viability of the chosen Grant Holder Institution.” (Vademecum 3.1.1, point 2). However, if we want to go down that route, someone else would need to take the lead of drafting the statutes of the “Verein”, as I will be busy drafting the main grant application.

Many greetings and speak soon,

Christian

Hi @Christian.winzer - I’ve been recommending the Openmod wiki to my students for a while now so time to contribute. (Didn’t even know you were involved!) Some suggestions and resources:

  1. In the ENSYSTRA project (https://ensystra.eu/) we are committed to open modelling. I’ve been involved in writing our data strategies and protocols, which I can probably share. We will also have a workshop on open modelling at some point.

  2. I organised a workshop on data science for energy back in 2016. Full report here: https://atienergyworkshop.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/c73-post-workshop-report-final-public.pdf
    Many of these questions are still relevant, including

  • Do we need data and modelling standards to more effectively exchange data? These do not generally exist even in industry (e.g., TSOs and DNOs exchange csv files and then spend a lot of time checking and converting them into useful formats). If so, how do these come about?
  • Best practices for recording and using uncertain data. Increasingly we do not just need point estimates but a good quantification of uncertainty. How do we ensure this, especially in an open science framework?
  • How can we use data that is subject to data protection legislation efficiently? In the UK, at least, there is tendency for smart meter data, etc., to increasingly be legally owned by the consumer. It is quite possible that in the future, utilities and the like will therefore have less information about energy demand than they have now despite more data being generated. Which parts of these data are most valuable and how can we ensure that they can be made open without harming consumers?
  • How can we get industry to use open modelling methods? Many big players are hesitant because, e.g., Julia does not come with the support that Matlab does.
  • How do we check the accuracy of long-term planning models? This does not fit well with research projects, which are typically 3-5 years in duration. Nobody ever seems to go back to check, say, ten years down the line. Can open modelling help with this?
  1. The UK is woefully behind Germany when it comes to Open Science so I will contribute to this proposal where I can. I may be able to throw some resources at it. The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science, will be very interested and can probably at the very least provide meeting space in central London if that is ever required.
1 Like

Hello @hvanderweijde Interesting. Some responses and recent references follow.

Unfortunately I cannot say much but there will be a significant report on open electricity data made public in early September 2018 which should cover a number of the points you raise.

Smart metered data from households almost certainly classifies as personal information under the GDPR. In which case, the Right to Data Portability (RtDP) (GDPR article.20) also applies. Spatially aggregated smart meter data should not present privacy issues but, as you indicate, may well be politically difficult to obtain. For many modeling purposes, distribution transformer logs should suffice together with suitable downscaling techniques.

Data standards can be specific or general. See here for an emerging energy sector metadata standard. There is also work underway to develop an energy sector ontology (systematized knowledge) being led by @ludwig.huelk

Not sure I agree with your impressions regarding proprietary versus open source support. My experiences in relation to open source support are favorable (for instance, I recently got an unsolicited personal introduction to the lead designer of Julia).

Regarding model longevity, I think open source has much to offer here. Besides some long established closed models are going open incrementally, with one example being MESSAGEix.

In terms of meeting in London, I am sure the openmod community would like to develop better contacts with UK researchers (currently mostly limited to ICL). You might well consider hosting an openmod workshop in due course?

References

European Commission (December 2017). Legal opinion: legal aspects of European energy data — Output 2 of the “Study on the quality of electricity market data”. Brussels, Belgium: European Commission.

Hirth, Lion, Jonathan Mühlenpfordt, and Marisa Bulkeley (1 September 2018). “The ENTSO-E Transparency Platform: a review of Europe’s most ambitious electricity data platform”. Applied Energy. 225: 1054–1067. ISSN 0306-2619. doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.04.048. Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 license.

Postscript

Just to comment on your “increasingly be legally owned by the consumer” remark for household metered data. As far as I am aware, there is no legal ownership in such datasets. The GDPR is very intentionally formulated under human rights and not property rights doctrines. Nor is such data is covered by any intellectual property right. It is not authored, so copyright does not apply. It is a spin-off from provision and billing, so a database right does not apply. It has no competitive value to the householder (who is not engaged in commerce in any case) and therefore does not class as a trade secret. I am not aware of any special legislation in the United Kingdom that grants property rights to household electricity data. Or am I missing something? Google suggests not.

Dear all, as announced through the mailing list, we now have a draft COST grant proposal. However, as the COST program would not pay for research time, we need to make sure, that the proposal is in line with your current and planned research activities. For this purpose, please:

  1. Add (or modify) links to current projects in section 4 of the draft proposal, to give us a feeling how well the work-plan fits with ongoing activities
  2. Fill in this short survey after reading the proposal to indicate in which of the work-groups you would be interested (ideally in the course of this week)

Any other suggestions on the scope, the wording, or references to articles that we should cite are highly appreciated – either directly in the proposal, or in this forum thread (in case of issues that require wider discussion).

Please note that if we do not receive sufficient feedback regarding the intended scope of the proposal until mid-November, we may postpone the application until the next COST call in Spring 2019. This would give us the time to discuss the topic at the Aarhus workshop, but also delay the start of the funding until end 2019/early 2020.

Dear all,

in order to increase the chances of obtaining COST funding, we have eventually decided to postpone the submission of our proposal until the next collection date, which will be on 5th September 2019.

We want to use the time until then to further grow the consortium with regards to researchers from Inclusiveness Target Countries, as well as other institutions and initiatives that could help increase the impact of our network. You can find an overview of who registered so far here. If you know anyone, for whom this could be of interest, feel free to forward our short-summary, and invite them to register.

Within this context, we are investigating potential ideas for coordination with other modeling initiatives, such as the EMP-E, the IEA-ETSAP, or IRENA, e.g. by organizing a joint model evaluation exercise, where we could re-calculate some of their outlooks using different open source models. If you would like to contribute to this discussion, please feel free to post your ideas in this forum thread, and or join our next call on 9th January, 12:00-14:00 CET.

Looking forward to your replies and many greetings,

Christian

Dear Christian,

I read with interest our message forwarded to me by Francesco Lombardi.

We are interested in participating to the COST funding and also to investigate further space of cooperation with IRENA and IEA.

We would be happy to participate to a joint exercise of recalculating some of their outlook using different source models and opening the path to a shared process of "quality assurance" for empowering even more the open modelling approach.

Being convinced that one solution does not fit all, we would be also interested in investigating the potential opportunities coming from integrated approaches to link energy to other resources (like water and food) and to the other industrial sector within a national economy that are using energy.

I think it is too late to joint the tele-conference which will be hold in 20 minutes, but please, consider that Politecnico di Milano, our group of Sustainable Energy System Analysis and Modelling would be pleased to be part of the joint efforts.

Kind Regards

Emanuela

Hello @emycolombo Just to note that the OSeMOSYS energy model has branched out to include water management, then food, and then land‑use more generally. The term “nexus” is sometimes used to describe this approach. As far as I am aware, OSeMOSYS is the only open source model to do so. Does your research group offer open models? (If so, I will update Wikipedia). R.

Dear @emycolombo - many thanks for your reply and your interest!

As part of our onboarding process for the grant application you can:

  • Register here; I will then provide you access to our project drive and would ask you to
  • Read through the material on the project drive, in particular the technical annex.
  • Provide further detail on your intended contributions in this survey.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Dear Robbie,
thanks I know about it. I was only trying to remark the relevance of the nexus (among resourses) and the integration between energy modelling and environmental/economic analysis as a potential topic within the discussion with IRENA and IEA. We have done some work on the second part and in few days I will send some materials to the community. Thanks you for your kind reply.

Emanuela

Dear @Christian.winzer,

I am as well a member of the research group of Emanuela and I registered today to provide further support to the COST grant from our side, as I am myself deeply involved in open energy modelling research.

Unfortunately, I will miss the upcoming workshop in Aarhus where you are planning a specific session on the topic, but I read you are working on “remote workshop” options, so I hope there are ways for me to participate remotely and keep updated about the project.

Answering instead with some delay to the question of @robbie.morrison, yes we are currently working 100% on open models, either collaborating on existing projects or developing new ones. To this regard, we recently published and (pre-)released the model “RAMP” for the generation of high-resolution multi-energy demand profiles (whose repository can be found here: https://github.com/SESAM-Polimi/RAMP), developed jointly with other colleagues of the OpenMod community, as listed on the repository.

Best,

Francesco

Hi Francesco, our Do-A-Thon session is currently planned for Thursday, 23rd May, 13:00-15:00 (CET).
I will post the dial-in details in the corresponding forum thread in the morning… Looking forward to your comments and the discussions :-)!

1 Like

Thanks a lot for the information, I’ll be ready to connect and participate!

Francesco

Dear all,

we have now revised the work-plan based on input from the last Openmod workshop. If you haven’t already done so, please take a look at section 4 in the technical annex - in particular the description of summer schools - in the next couple of days, and add your questions / suggestions / alternative formulations and ideas.

To avoid inflating the work programm and make it look unrealistic, I would personally delete the [Tasks and deliverables in bracket and italics…] So if you are committed to perform these tasks, and want me to include them, please add a note. Otherwise I would delete them from the proposal (we can still come back to them in future…)

As suggested in Aarhus, I have exchanged some mails with the COST association / our Swiss contact point regarding questions about the grant administration that came up at the meeting. You can find my questions and the answers from the COST association / our Swiss contact point below.

My conclusions from this are:

  • we need to delete or hide all public forum threads and messages referring to the COST grant prior to the grant submission in September (to avoid breaching anonymity)
  • we cannot stipulate flexible responsibilities ex ante; towards the COST association, the responsibility for organising workshops / drafting progress reports etc. will rest with the action chair and work-group leaders; however, this does not prevent them from following our current practice of electing the workshop host & location for each year and collecting inputs for “do-a-thons” through the forum (which should be in their interest, as they cannot force people to hold presentations)
  • we cannot stipulate decisions based on majority vote, as decisions must be taken by the “management committee”, where Inclusiveness Target Countries represent the majority. However, we may continue to collect views and votes regarding allocation of funds etc. through our Openmod mailing list as non-binding input for decisions by the management committee.
  • we cannot use letters of support as an alternative way of adding people to our network; institutions such as NGOs, International Organisations, Companies and Public Authorities can either join our network of proposers (which would strenghten our proposal), or we can mention that we are “in close contact” with them (better than nothing…but probably not a strong selling point).

As next steps we will:

  • Collect feedback from NGOs (following the NGO-Bridge meeting), IEA ETSAP, and other organisations (e.g. industry?, government agencies?) regarding their participation and suggestions on the workplan, and amend the proposal accordingly.
  • Ask national contact points from a couple of countries to review our proposal and advise us on further adjustments.

Questions to COST association (forwarded by our Swiss contact point):

Dr. Winzer (in cc) intends to submit a proposal for a COST Action; I would like to double-check your opinion on some questions he asked. He is already part of a network, which is seeking to extend itself through a COST Action and get some funding for their activities. Their Action would thus be linked to the openmod initiative. Much of their discussion regarding grant preparation has been carried out in the public, e.g. this forum thread, or the Mailing list. If they refer to openmod as related network, do they have to delete / hide these forum entries and Mails during the evaluation period to avoid breaching anonymity requirements? The SESA guidelines specify that proposers and/or institutions’ names should neither be explicitly mentioned, nor be potentially identifiable through links to web page. Since hiding or deleting these forum threads needs quite some efforts as information is somewhat spread, could you please inform us whether this would breach the anonymity requirements or not?

Another question related to the submission of a proposal: is it possible to submit support letters from colleagues at organisations interested in the Action who might not appear as applicant or can they only be mentioned in the description of mutual benefit?

Answer by the COST association:

Thank you for your email.

Proposers should not relate proposers as members of any existing network/initiative/project; public forum threads which disclose proposers may lead to eligibility breach.

Support letters are not accepted in the evaluation process.

Additional questions to our Swiss contact point:

A few additional questions that came up during our workshop in Aarhus last week regarding governance are:

• Voting Procedures: In the past, we have taken decisions by simple majority vote. The Guidelines on Action Management, Section 4.3.7 allow the MC to delegate some of its tasks to other committees. Could we also specify, that they delegate some / all decisions to a simple “majority vote” by all forum subscribers? If so, when / where would we need to specify this?

• Action Chair: We had used “rotating responsibilities” in the past. Each year we voted on the organizer & venue for the next conferences, who were then responsible for “convening the meetings”, “monitoring the outcome” (i.e. in collect feedback on improvement suggestions for next workshops). Ideally, we would use a similar approach in the COST grant. Do you think that would be possible? If so, when / where would we need to specify this?

And there was also a question regarding how the total budget for the action is calculated :

• Is it important that we specify all planned summer schools / STSMs / number of participants in conferences beforehand? Or is the budget independent / will be scaled if further conference participants / STSMs or summer schools are added later on?

Answers from the Swiss contact point regarding additional questions:

  1. Decisions are still taken by simple majority vote at Action MC meetings provided at least two-thirds of the COST Full or Cooperating Members are represented, see Art. 9 of Annex I “Rules of procedure for COST Action management committees” of the “COST Action management, monitoring and final assessment”, see also end of section 4.3.1 of the Guidelines on Action Management, which explains that written procedures via email are possible as well. The delegation concerns “specific tasks” but not entire voting rights, otherwise any other regulations on voting would be meaningless.
  2. According to Art. 7 of the same annex “The Action MC appoints by a simple majority vote from among its members an Action Chair and a Vice Chair for the duration of the Action”. But “In the event of the premature resignation or termination of the appointment of the Action Chair or ViceChair, they shall be replaced for the remainder of the mandate, again by a simple majority vote to elect a new Action Chair and/or Vice-Chair.” According to the definition in the Vademecum, a “Chair is elected during an Action MC meeting by the Action MC from amongst the Action’s MC members”, which again does not exclude changes in this position. So even though not formally foreseen, it is not forbidden to rotate the roles.
  3. Specifying all planned summer schools / STSMs / number of participants in conferences 4-5 years in advance in a proposals does not seem very reliable information, thus I doubt that this can reasonably be expected. An order of magnitude or aim could however make sense. If I understand correctly how the funding is distributed, it mainly depends on the number of participating eligible countries during the lifetime of an Action and not on the number of planned activities. Notice that you cannot influence the budget in your application.

Dear Openmoders,

as the deadline for submission of our COST proposal (on 4th September) is approaching, I just wanted to give you a short update. Regarding our:

Network: Our network of proposers** now spans 38 researchers from 14 Inclusiveness Target countries and 7 full member states. The EU-JRC and Eurelectric will join us as secondary proposers, and discussions with other organizations are ongoing. All registered proposers will receive a new invitation to join the application on e-cost.

Proposal text: We have updated out proposal text for the General Features, Technical Annex and Cost Mission and Policies sections, and will now send it for review to members of the COST scientific committee.

Forum & Mailing list: To comply with anonymity requirements, we will need to REMOVE PUBLIC EMAIL, FORUM ENTRIES and LINKS related to the grant application from the openmod website / forums / mail archive.

The last point means, that the grant application will go “off-line” towards mid / end August!

If you want to provide any further comments on the application, please do so asap, ideally through this forum thread (so that others can see and interact).

I am on holiday 25th July to 6th August , but will aim to reply as soon as I can after my return.

Thank you in advance and wishing you all a nice summer break!

Christian

@Christian.winzer asked me to contact NGOs and seek support for our grant application.

If you would like to do something similar and need a template, here is my draft for approaching organizations specifically advocating for citizens’ assemblies. But you should also coordinate with Christian too.


Request for letter of support for COST grant

Hello CA advocate

Volunteers from the Open Energy Modelling Initiative (openmod for short) are currently finalizing their COST grant application for networking. Further background on the openmod can be found on wikipedia — with links to our mailing list, forum, and wiki on the right side.

We are asking for letters of support. [see next posting for an explanation of what is being sought]

I’ve lost track of the exact amount being applied for, but it will be six figures. If successful, it will enable us to diversify our network, better engage with the public, and begin to build a predominantly online community to undertake common pool analysis of future energy systems — listed in order of increasing risk.

Further background and discussion on our grant on our online forum.

Because most aspects of energy policy do not have simple answers, integrated analysis is necessary. Furthermore, that analysis should be, at the very least, public, transparent, and reproducible. Which also means suitable open licenses on all code, datasets, and documentation.

Using open science principles, the openmod community is interested in providing support for sortition‑based processes like Citizens’ Assemblies. Modelers could assist by helping select modeling tools, providing datasets, and running various analyses. What individual modelers personally happen to think about potential solutions such as nuclear power, CCS, bioenergy, photovoltaics, demand‑response, or autarky, is largely immaterial.

As indicated, we are seeking support from third‑party organizations to back our COST application in general terms. Absolutely no obligations will arise as a result. But you will need to respond with a letter within a week because the application deadline is 5 September 2019.

In which case, can you reply to Dr Christian Winzer, Center for Energy and Environment, Zurich University of Applied Science (ZHAW) to discuss the details.

A new kind of genuinely open science combined with deep stakeholder engagement offers considerable potential in my view. I’ve been involved academically with energy policy modeling for 25 years and with energy policy more generally for a decade prior. And I am fully convinced that we are dealing with complex systems and that model‑mediated public discourse is both essential and beneficial. But this requires that suitable stakeholder networks, novel public processes, and new relationships with domain experts be developed and refined. Most of the technical tool chain now exists, but the deep engagement with civil society does not — hence our COST grant.

TIA for your support, Robbie

Hi Robbie, thank you for posting!

One small, but important correction to the letter:

  • I[quote=“Christian.winzer, post:15, topic:966”]
    we cannot use letters of support as an alternative way of adding people to our network; institutions such as NGOs, International Organisations, Companies and Public Authorities can either join our network of proposers (which would strenghten our proposal), or we can mention that we are “in close contact” with them (better than nothing…but probably not a strong selling point).
    [/quote]

Rather than asking for letters of support, we should thus ask the organisations whether they would be happy to “join our grant application as co-proposers”. The process for this is fairly simple: I would send them an invitation via email, and they fill-in the registration form on e-cost.

In case of international NGOs / movements, we may be able to name them explicitly (which would be ideal). National NGOs could also join, but we are not allowed to name them in the proposal.

While I am not aware, of any legal obligations arising from the role as proposer, I would only encourage those NGOs to apply, who are actually interested to interact with the openmod community, e.g. by attending (some of ) our workshops, seminars, grant management meetings (1-2 per year) etc. Of course, the level of interest / engagement may change later on. But there is no point to apply, if they do not at least intend to join some of our activities.

Hope that helps - if there are further questions let me know!

Many greetings, christian

My posting now with the requests for a letter of support struck out. Thanks for the clarification.

Returning this topic to public view following the grant review process. We were earlier required to suppress public information that could potentially influence the review panel.