SIG-Marcomms meeting 27-29 September 2016

HITSA formed by merger of EENet (oldest part nearly 25 yrs), Estonian IT foundation for colleges, and an institution to bring internet into schools. Around 100 emplyees, in 2 towns, 50 million euro budget per year. IT in education HITSA's focus, so supports and finances IT in education projects, and systems, e.g. university admissions systems, training. Want IT support infrastucture for all ministries of education and research, so provide customer support for users. EENet will see lots of positive devpts in futre. In coming 5 years will invest 15 million euros in rebuilding school networks, financed by EU structural funds. There are 1.3 million people spread over country size of NL, so are many small schools spread across countryside, but now consolidating many so by 2020 around 100 fewer. A challenge is that according to EU rules can only put into schools that will still be open for 5+ years. HITSA is mostly governmentt funded but a little also from fees from IT colleges. EENet provides some services for money, and there’s some sponsorship – IT academy is sponsored by Skype. Balance of revenue unlikely to change. After 2020 will see end to EC structural funds.

HITSA founding parties include ministry of education, universities that are teaching these fields, Estonian Telecoms. Daily work includes representing various interest groups, communicating to different audiences, variety of messages etc. Specialists are always somewhere else, you get your timeframe from others, how to make everybody happy? Can influence one group by influencing another. Have forums where ask questions we need ansers to, don’t rely on what technical colleagues think is needed. Many departments bring tasks all at the same time so timing is crucial. Have created processes to organise the timing as best as possible, so give ‘rules’ for how project people can get to you – e.g. fill in a form requesting a press release at least 2 days in advance of publications – have communicated those rules – e.g. if want giveways. Ability to say no / not now to projects clamouring for last minute attention. Key is to know what are the biggest and most important projects for the coming year and to be involved even earlier in their planning so can explain the marketing viewpoint. Have projects that are less technical, so e.g. technology day for kids, with exhibition space, workshops, dealers to sell technical stuff, universities there etc. Planning to do a YouTuber contest – we want to create YouTubers to cooperate with as technology reporters. Biggest robotics competition in Europe, we are organising and supporting. These fields give plenty of opportunities to be creative.

*Jisc is going though a phase where the marcomms team is taking control of the planning process based on evidence of what users need, rather than driven by any project. SURFnet marcomms also try to be in a new project immediately, asking what’s the benefit, is it suitable for our audience, and if it’s not then maybe we shouldn’t do it / do it differently. Marcomms team has audience feedback so should act as a representative of the audience.

*Sometimes projects evolve to produce services / products. In Finland NREN marcomms have tried to convey that if the minister of education wants to develop services within a project, but there ’s no finance to sustain it afterwards as a service, that's no good. It’s a way of undermining your reputation for reliability if everything made in a project dies after a few years.

EENet's 10 gig optical backbone work will continue with state research infrastructure roadmap project. Now have connectivity to Funet, Helsinki and via there to NORDUnet and Russia. Offer web hosting, emails, mailing lists, domain registration, collection of free software instructions, virtual private server cloud, have 72 terabyte storage. Lot of work going on in AAI development – have developed TAAT infrastructure for research, identity management solution for education will be taken up in the schools project that Erki mentioned. Customer support is part of what they do. User surveys since 1988, now only every few years. Projects a big area. Past 2 years been active in GN4-2 covering a large area not just the networking, but also platform innovation, trust and identity development, Compendium, project communications. Grid and E-IRG activities too. What has ‘sold’ well – annual computer drawing competition. ‘Time path’ is this year’s theme. Has become so popular we no longer have to market it. Nature webcameras have also become so popular that people see them all over the world. Anniversary a few years ago was also a good opportunity for marketing. Not enough time to do social media regularly so computer drawing competition has a Facebook page and during the anniversary started Twitter – but intermittent. Challenge – lack of resource and the profile of EENet is different from HITSA's, so there's a need for messages that are not covered in HITSA overall.

Laetitia's slides as pdf,
and as pptx