Coordination
The consortium supported each societal community through appointed domain and a technical representatives, ensuring that project proceedings are delivered to the community for the highest impact. Community building activities carried out in the first half of the project diminished gradually towards the end of the project and efforts were instead invested in intensive dissemination of project results.
Community activities provided a rich source of input for the support action throughout the project’s duration. In the first half of the project, the stakeholder’s engagement was planned around the requirements elicitation that shaped the architecture behind the BDI platform. In the second half, community activities were heavily centered around the pilots showcasing the applicability of BDI. The development of the platform was extended to the project's end (final release in November 2017) to incorporate further stakeholder feedback.
Throughout the project, progress and results were frequently disseminated through various communication channels, most importantly via the website (and it’s seven community-focussed subpages), periodic newsletters, and social media. Apart from the 21 face-to-face workshops, the 33 hangouts (societal focus) and 5 technical webinars (cross-sectoral interest) provided to be a very popular means of dissemination; with the added value that a majority of them are also recorded for posterity (Youtube). Event material and presentations are openly accessible on the project’s SlideShare account. To date, the project has issued six newsletters and current subscribers exceed 1,000.
Support
In the first half of the project, experts in the consortium conducted a survey of the state-of-the-art in big data technology, in search of the most suitable existing open-source components and methods that can address the identified stakeholder challenges. Via the chosen deployment strategy the ‘plug-and-play’ Big Data Integrator supports the stacking of alternative components, thus retaining flexibility while recommending various setups for different Big Data requirements. An instance of BDI with a predefined list of core components that meet the elicited stakeholder requirements has been deployed for each societal domain. In parallel, the consortium set out to demonstrate how BDI can be easily deployed and used for a wide range of real world use-cases.
In the second half of the project, technical efforts shifted focus to the seven societal pilots selected. Pilots were implemented in three phases, each time increasing their breadth of applicability while at the same time taking the opportunity to disseminate intermediate results and gather feedback from stakeholders.
The generic Big Data Integrator, the seven domain-specific instances, and the seven realised pilot solutions, are all provided as open-source solutions offering interested parties the opportunity to reproduce or customise the solutions remotely. Technical specifications, how-to’s and demonstrators are linked through the project’s website and is maintained on the project’s GitHub account.
