First results of IST's second call for proposals
The Commission (DG Information Society) received 1138 proposals, in response to the second IST call which closed on 17 January 2000. This amounts to a total requested Community contribution of some 1.3 billion euro, in comparison to the indicative budget for the call of 400 million euro. As a result of technical evaluation undertaken by panels of independent experts, 217 proposals successfully passed the evaluation thresholds and were given a priority ranking. This amounts to a success rate of about 1 : 5.2 of the total number of IST proposals received. The coordinators of all proposals have been notified of their individual technical evaluation result in letters sent out by DG Information Society from Monday 13 March 2000. This immediate feedback keeps all proposers much more closely informed of progress than was the case for the first call. Negotiations are expected to begin (for the most urgent cases) in mid April 2000 and projects are expected to be signed and start work before the summer holidays. A third call for proposals was opened on 10 February 2000 with a submission date (for fixed deadline proposals) of 10 May 2000.