1st Board meeting
10 May 2017
Porto, Portugal
Agenda
| Agenda items | Notes |
|---|---|
| 0. Reporting. The Management Team, practically the project coordinator (myself) should report to the Board quarterly. My idea is to agree on a simple email template that I'm going to use for regular reporting with items that you need to know. Trello should be your tool to dig deeper into the details. | |
1. Review the technical progress, time line, and deliverables. There were 3 ethics deliverables, 1 dissemination and 1 training plan "online document" submitted to the EC in the 1st quarter (Jan-March). Other deliverables and milestones are approaching in M6 M8 and M12. WP2 and WP6 might be low on resources. WP8 should kick in soon. | |
2. Financial overview. Ideally, the project coordinator should see the financial progress on the partners quarterly. This is what I requested at the GA meeting and Amsterdam and I got no comments. It turned out though that the quarterly financial reporting is difficult for some partners. Only 8 partners provided data out of 18 by the extended deadline. I need the Board to revise this practice and make a decision. Maybe escalate to the GA again. Up2U Total Project Costs Summary - M03 Mar 2017.pdf Issues to be discussed: - Only 10 partners provided data out of 18. TAU officially complained about the informal quarterly reporting practice. We need a decision how to address the situation. - Compared to the linear progress in Q1 (based on 10 partners data) both the personnel costs and the other costs (incl. travel) are under average: 91% personnel cost and 80% other costs in total. But there are some anomalies... - PSNC claimed 3x higher personnel costs compared to linear progress. I think this is because of their expensive manager. If they continue doing so, they will run out of money soon. We have to address this issue with PSNC. - Partners are generally low on travel budget. The situation with NTUA and ISEP needs to be solved soon, could also cause cash problems. There are some warnings at FCT and KIFU too. In contrary, the personnel costs are only claimed at about 40% in most of the cases. The solution might be to shift budget from PM to Other. Maybe later in the year. | |
3. Rearrangement of travel budgets. In general, the project budget is low on travel for every partner. Some partners already signalled this. We have to decide how to handle the issue. Some budget from GÉANT can be redistributed to partners. Also some partners travel more than the others. We need to see how to consider this in a fair way. | |
| 4. Appointment of the SMC members. There is a list of SMC candidates at https://up2university.eu/smc-members/ Officially, the Board has to appoint the permanent committee members. | |
5. Any other business. Please, let me know. |