| Project of the Month - July 2009
ISTOK-SOYUZ
The ISTOK-SOYUZ Project – a special support action co-funded by the FP7 ICT programme of the European Commission – was initiated by the eight partners from seven countries. Based on the sound outcomes and lessons learnt of ISTOK.Ru project (www.istok-ru.eu) implemented in Russia in 2006-2008, the ISTOK-SOYUZ project will expand this experience to the Eastern Europe & Central Asia countries, identifying and promoting visibility of mutual RTD potential and collaboration opportunities.
Description of the Project
ISTOK-SOYUZ (
Information
Society
Technologies to
Open
Knowledge for Eastern Europe and Central Asia) project is a special support action that started in January 2009. It, based on the sound outcomes and lessons learnt of ISTOK.Ru project (
http://www.istok-ru.eu/) implemented in Russia in 2006-2008, will expand ISTOK experience to the EECA countries, identifying and promoting visibility of mutual RTD potential and collaboration opportunities. The overall objective of the Project is to explore new opportunities for ICT collaboration between EU and EECA countries and to foster the EU ICT programme awareness activities in order to increase the number of the international collaboration projects.
The 30-month project aims to:
- promote the EU ICT programme, raise awareness about benefits of mutual collaboration and identify ICT landscape and potential for R&D ICT collaboration between European Union and all 12 addressed countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA);
- expand EU-Russian ICT research community to 4 other targeted countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan) through opening of ISTOK competence platform to these countries and implementing pilot actions as well as networking & brokerage events aiming to increase visibility of cooperation opportunities;
- provide support to the teams from targeted countries in order to increase number of ICT FP7 partnerships between researchers from Europe and targeted
countries.
The project activities will be done in collaboration with national stakeholders and other relevant co-operation projects in view of exploiting synergies and maximising impact. Clustering approach involving two other FP7 projects started in parallel with ISTOK-SOYUZ – SCUBE-ICT and EXTEND – will be applied (in particular for the specific activities in Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia) in order to increase the benefit for the joint EU – EECA research from the support actions of three projects. ISTOK-SOYUZ has formed a Cluster targeting the EECA regions http://www.eeca-ict.eu/ with the EU supported projects:
FP7 info and project number
Funded under 7th Seventh Framework Programme Research area: ICT-2007.9.2 International cooperation Project Reference: 231665.
Participating Countries
Armenia, Belarus, Germany, France, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine.
Photos
