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The proposed Forum will bring significant advancement to the current state of the art of European marine and maritime science and technology sectors. The key networks representing science and technology development will work together to reduce fragmentation and complexity by testing and establishing appropriate cooperation mechanisms on various stakeholder levels. Having established effective dialogue mechanisms the Forum will be ready to consult relevant policy makers.
Project activities will start with interdisciplinary dialogue across marine and maritime science on a regional and pan-European basis. The process will contribute to developing interactions within the Partnership (the research community, industry, academia, regional authorities and other stakeholders). These exercises will strengthen the interdisciplinary approach to marine science and help better understand the interactions and potential for interaction between maritime activities. The core of the work will concentrate on fostering cooperation and stimulating networking activities and facilitating shared delivery of networking services. This will be achieved through debate and exchange of experience and knowledge at the Forum level, and through joint networking between Forum members. It will strive to avoid duplication of existing services and respecting the management arrangements, objectives and status of the member organizations. An effectively established Forum for dialogue with the European Commission and other policy makers on the development and implementation of the marine and maritime research policy will mean reducing fragmentation and taking better advantage of the widespread and diverse knowledge, experience and information existing in the European communities of maritime, marine and coastal professionals.
The process will try to build a degree of flexibility in order to reflect the open bottom up character of the Partnership Forum and the networks partners themselves. This will be reflected in the future operational activities of the panels and will be discussed by the project s Steering Committee when the development phase is completed. The proposed description of work stresses that this is a learning from best practices exercise and thus certain things are impossible to programme in advance. However the structure of work packages (see the graph below) shows that WP1 will create a fundament for the other WPs and Panels by providing a generic, pan-European synthesis of the policy scene and by identifying regional specificities, priorities and commonalities. Basing on that information, various collaboration mechanisms will be tested within WP2,3&4 and integrated results of these will feed the work package on communication and networking. Within this work package the five Panels will become operational. The combined result of these activities will constitute the Marine and Maritime Science and Technology Forum at the end of the project life cycle.