Strategic Service Sustainability for DARIAH (S34D)

The DARIAH Theme is an annual area of focus chosen for investment by the DARIAH Board of Directors. For 2018, we have selected ‘Strategic Service Sustainability for DARIAH’ as our fourth theme. Previous themes have been: ‘Open Humanities’ (6 funded projects), ‘Public Humanities’ (7 funded projects) and ‘Cultural Heritage and Humanities Research’ (7 funded projects).

Background

The first three DARIAH themes have focussed on the delivery of networking and knowledge-sharing events. In 2018, we would like to do something different, focussing our attention on the chronic problem of software/tool sustainability in the digital humanities, while also looking forward to the build phase of the DARIAH Marketplace for data, tools and services.

We therefore invite researchers from the DARIAH community who have built tools or services with a potentially wide long-term usership to submit a proposal for theme funding. This funding should be viewed as a transitional support to ensure a service is functional and accessible and that any development gaps are filled before it is hosted in a stable way by a DARIAH member state (not necessarily your own). It should improve upon your work to date, but also contribute to embedding it fully into the distributed and central DARIAH infrastructure and team. This can be achieved by bringing together existing development work, central assets and services and national contributions to maximise the value and visibility of previous investment (such as know-how, management expertise, networking support, and opportunities like the DARIAH Annual event).

Applicants will need to show a clear integration case: how does your service or tool become a part of DARIAH’s strategy, positioned in terms of the Strategic Action Plan and nascent DARIAH vision and values? In other words, how will DARIAH activities be shaped by it in the future? How might it become the core of a future development? How might investment make the tool or service sustainable, and what would be its impact on the DARIAH community? In particular, if you could imagine this integrated into the EOSC, make this aspect explicit.  

Proposals & Eligibility

To apply, please submit a description (2–4 pages in length) providing us with:

• A description of the tool or service
• A clear plan for how you will use the funding to contribute to its long-term sustainability, and how you will leverage national, local and DARIAH contributions to deliver this
• A description of how you will spend the funding requested
• The name and postal address of the main partner and budget holding institution
• The name and e-mail address of the contact person leading and/or coordinating the project.

 Furthermore, we expect an outline of the costs of not more than 1 page. Maximum allowable budget is €20 000, but please note that value for money will be an assessment criterion. Allowable costs under the scheme include:

• Software development, including standardisation, API development or other tweaks required to facilitate long-term hosting
• Travel to negotiate relationships with potential sustainability partners
• Small-scale development studies on usage, development of use cases, or impact assessment, if justified
• Generation of usage-enhancing assets, like a multilingual interface, educational materials or more user-friendly documentation
• Other justifiable costs (by previous agreement with the DARIAH team)

Please note that we will not fund:

• hosting as a service (e.g., on a commercial cloud solution)
• long-term financing of person months
• new tools and services

The scientific committee for the reviewing process will be comprised of members of the DARIAH Senior Management Team with additional invited experts, as required. Upon successful application, Grant Agreements will be signed between DARIAH and the budget holding institutions.

All successful applicants will be expected to participate in a plenary event on the topic of Sustainability and the Marketplace at the DARIAH Annual Event in Warsaw in Spring 2019.

Key dates

Deadline for submissions: September 9, 2018

Review process: until September 30, 2018

Notifications to applicants: early October, 2018

Start date of projects: November/December 2018

End date of projects: November–December 2019 (1-year project funding)

Please, submit applications directly on the website https://dariahtheme2018.sciencesconf.org/ (you need to create an account, then to register before submitting your abstract) AND by e-mail to theme@dariah.eu.

For more information contact: theme@dariah.eu