Task 5.1 Action plan for outreach, awareness and sustainability (RILHAS, FFZG, IPIPAN, IPUP, IBL, LSIL; M01-M06):

A detailed action plan for outreach, awareness and sustainability will be developed detailing awareness, community mobilisation and dissemination actions to be undertaken in each country covered by the project, with the aim of maximising the project's impact and ensuring its sustainability beyond the EU-supported phase. The action plan will focus on three main groups:

• research community in human language technology and other related domains;
• economy, both language industry and other business sectors;
• society, government and other public decision makers.

The description of Task 2.1 gives a tentative classification of our target groups. The analysis of users’ needs, that will also be performed in the Task 2.1, will serve as valuable input that will ensure that this action plan is tailored to the users’ needs as much as possible.

This action plan will be updated at M12 and towards the end of the project to include further actions to be undertaken after the end of the EU contract.

 An action plan for will be produced in order to maximise the probability of identifying appropriate channels and events for dissemination thus giving raise to outreach and awareness about the role of LT and project CESAR at international and national level. Specifically, each partner in the CESAR consortium will be asked to provide a series of potential contacts and channels for dissemination at national level. Also each partner will be asked to provide the list of relevant players in LT field from the national level (research, business and policy stakeholders) and this list will be used in preparation of the Action plan.

All this information will be collated and this methodology will be used to select events, channels and key players where the presentations and information about CESAR will be disseminated on both levels, national and international.

The plan will detail dissemination activities in scientific & non-scientific circles; printed & electronic publications, international events (science, technology, media, professional, industrial and political) as well as CESAR events and dissemination channels. The plan will be updated in D5.3 when the final report on outreach, awareness and sustainability will be produced at the end of the project.

The channels of dissemination will cover traditional dissemination means (flyers, posters, public web-page, scientific / professional conference / events presence / lectures / presentations / demonstrations, press releases), but also some newer channels of dissemination (e.g. video-lectures, Wikipedia article on all project languages, social networks etc.). Public web pages will feature special sections with information for: researchers, industry, media. The address www.cesar-project.net was available domain name and it has been reserved already and it will serve for national and regional dissemination purposes. Also all relevant linkages with the META-NET web-site will be established in order to provide mutual visibility and accessibility for users.

The META-NET visual identity will be incorporated in all CESAR dissemination channels.

One of the most important means of enhancing awareness in business, society and government will be a series of nationally organized high-level events (a „road show“) that will take place in each country at least once in project duration. We find this form very suitable for local governmental officials and industry leaders in this region of Europe in getting acquainted with the META-NET NoE and the role of LRT in general. Expected impact is enhanced support for LRT at the national level by both, industry and government.

The internal database of all relevant stakeholders at different national levels will be organized and mantained for efficient processing/inviting/sharing information with them and CESAR consortium partners as well as all other META-NET partners.

Task 5.2 Mobilise the research community (RILHAS, TMIT, FFZG, IPIPAN, ULodz, UBG, IPUP, IBL, LSIL; M04-M24):

 The research community at national level will be reached by dissemination channels (traditional or not so traditional) that are planned in 5.1 in order to attract the players to participate in sharing resources and tools through META-SHARE platform. Also collaborative participation with national CESAR partner at different national and international conferences will be favoured since this will help other players to present their work. In this sense CESAR partners could play the role of catalyst in transferring the information about different LT players from the national level.

Applicability of some type of seal of approval originated from international bodies/projects/initiatives/networks will be also investigated. Such a seal, harmonized with META-NET or other infrastructures, that CESAR could issue if certain nationally-based or nationally funded language resource or tool complies with predefined standard(s), could be one of means to attract other players at the national level and to mark certain level of compatibility and quality that resource or tool have. 

The exact start of this task is dependent on the launch of the first META-SHAREservices.

Task 5.3 Increase visibility within business and industry (RILHAS, TMIT, FFZG, IPIPAN, ULodz, UBG, IPUP, IBL, LSIL; M04-M24):

Industry at national level will be reached by dissemination channels that are described in 5.1 in order to increase visibility of LT research. A set of predefined usage-scenarios will be defined for demonstration purposes. This demonstration actions will be accessible on-line, but also as manned demonstrations that will be performed on request by business and industry. These usage-scenarios will be oriented towards facilitating and supporting existing work-flows in text-based industries (paper and e-publishing: traditional publishing houses and Internet portals; information brokerage: newswire agencies and clipping/summarizing companies; localisation and translation services). These usage-scenarios will also demonstrate the possibilities to come up with new products such as shallow semantical analysis of documents, visualization of entity-relations, targeted tracking of selected entities, sentiment detection etc. 

Each partner will participate in dissemination and demonstration actions / events at its own national level accompanied by some partners from other countries when needed.

The exact start of this task is dependant on the launch of the first META-SHAREservices.

Task 5.4 Enhance awareness in society and government (RILHAS, TMIT, FFZG, IPIPAN, UBG, IPUP, IBL, LSIL; M08-M24):

Beside the defined dissemination channels, that will be used for both, society and government awareness rising as usual, several awareness-rising activities will be used at governmental/funding organisations/language councils levels. The fact is that it is not enough to have LT developed for a language, but these technologies should be accessible for all types of users at national level (all citizens), but also at international level (all EU citizens). While EC should support this efforts through different networking actions and schemas (like META-NET), it should be stated that the funding on the national level should also provide the sustainability of developed LT for a certain language.

Also, the international presentation of projects aims will be strongly supported. Our experience tells us that experts from abroad presenting the same topic to decision makers and founders at national level usually achieve much better results than domestic experts. Our plan is to organize a series of events in the form of a „road show“ that will happen at the highest level in every CESAR country at least once in the project duration (see Task 5.1. above). We expect that at this kind of high-level presentation of META-NET and CESAR all relevant stakeholders at national level should be invited and present: from research, industry and policy. We also expect that officials from META-NET, DG Information Society and Media - and other similar projects or institutions will provide support to this process by appearing at these events and giving presentations either in the capacity of EC representatives or as foreign LRT experts giving examples of best practice in the neighbouring countries. This is one of strategies that we would like to follow in order to make stronger impact, raise awareness and visibility at governmental and funding agencies level and thus help local experts in gaining support for the LT field from national funding through clear and sound European support. These events will be organized by local organizers, i.e. consortium member institutions from Poland, Slovaka, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria that play the key role in LRT at their national level anyway.  The logistics will be centrally co-ordinated from the WP5 and supported by resources set aside for dissemination to each partner and by minor subcontracting. To ensure that this events will be successful, it is vital to have envolved the key persons that are positioned highly in the science policy bodies at national and/or European level. This role can be played by the leader of WP5 package Marko Tadić since in the Republic of Croatia he is a member of the Council for the Humanities of the National Science Council, while at European level he is a member of the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation. In this respect he can cover both levels of representation at LRT awareness events at consortium partners' national level.

Task 5.5 EU-wide awareness, mobilisation and dissemination actions (RILHAS, TMIT, FFZG, IPIPAN, ULodz, UBG, IPUP, IBL, LSIL; M08-M24):

Project representatives will participate in relevant META-NET working groups. Where applicable they will contribute to transnational events organized by the EC and/or META-NET e.g. for government and industry representatives. They will likewise contribute to annual events of the META-NET Forum.

Dissemination activities at the European and global level will be coordinated and harmonised with META-NET dissemination activities in order to maximise the impact by controlled spread of different participant at different events.