Niels Ole Bernsen
Odense University
nob@mip.ou.dk

In late November 1997, i3net's Coordination Group (CG) met in Brussels for a brainstorming session on the i3net roadmap and technology strategy. The CG, whose members are listed elsewhere in this Issue, is the "think tank" of the i3 initiative and its task on that particular occasion was to explore a strategy that would encompass the i3 initiative as well as any other research effort in the domain, whether funded by public sources or otherwise. The brainstorm generated tons of ideas and it became the task of a smaller working party, Javier Segovia, Patrick Purcell, and myself, to subsequently sift through the lot - analysing, structuring, developing, throwing away - to draft a first i3 roadmap. Videoconferencing replacing travelling, this became the start of some hectic two months as it was soon felt that we might be looking at a new way for European researchers to work with industry in our domain and, hopefully, in other domains as well.

Compared to all or most previous European IT research efforts, the i3 community is special in three ways: it embodies a new mechanism of collaborative research, consisting in thirteen highly interrelated research projects supported by a network of excellence; it conducts some of the most forward-looking research worldwide, addressing the "communitarian" nature of future computing; and the research is focused on one broad area rather than looking at everything under the sun. In other words, underneath the hallmark of i3 - people, technology, and design - there was another triplet: critical mass, synergy and cutting-edge.

From there, a vision grew. The i3 community is not located in one building complex but in many. Yet videoconferencing and other advanced means of communication could establish the co-presence the community needs. Strong external communication could work as well for a distributed community as for a single laboratory. A professional IPRs, licenses, venture capital and technology scouting unit could be the point of business contact. Regular, i3-wide progress "fashion shows" could supplement visits to individual research sites, providing access for industry to exploit emerging results in near real time. And industrial sponsorship could set this strategy in motion.

Following the February 1998 CG meeting in Milan, several working parties are now seeking ways to implement the vision, every week discovering new topological features of the roadmapped terrain.

© 1998,1999,2000 i3net	-- Search i3net --	About the i3net web pages
Revised: 17 April, 1998.		Mail to webmaster@i3net.org