 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Platforms Open Call webinar for this year. My name's Kerry Leavitt. I'm the Platforms Program Manager for the Australian Research Data Commons. Also on the line we have Dr Andrew Trelaw, the Director of Platforms and Software. Sorry, my slides have just disappeared yet again. So first of all, I'd like to start with an acknowledgement of country. I live and work on Ghana land and I acknowledge the deep connection that the Ghana people have with their land and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. So this webinar, sorry, I'm having a lot of trouble with my slides today. I think the problem was me because I stopped sharing my webcam and that's what made your screen go strange. Okay, all right, I'll try and share again. Just takes a little while for this to come up, sorry. Okay, that looks better. Okay, so this webinar will present an overview of the Platforms Open Call for this year. We will have time for questions at the end so please enter all of your questions into the question box and if I can see them come up I'll try and answer them as I go but otherwise we'll answer them all at the end. This is being recorded so you'll be able to watch the recording once we've posted up. Okay, so let's get started. So a platform is out where defining a platform as a set of online services that allows researchers to do something with data so that could be find, collect, maybe in the field or capture from an instrument, analyze data, visualize that, present it and share it in a way that is fair or fair-ready. So the objectives for the Platforms program, we're looking for platforms that are transformative. So what we mean by that is we're looking for platforms that will change the way researchers conduct it that will enable the answering of quest research questions that haven't been able to be answered before or dramatically improve the way research is done or accelerate research, increase the speed at which it can be conducted. We're looking for a sustainable set of platforms that will be part of the comments, the Australian Research Data Commons. We're looking to have more researchers have access to platforms so that's more researchers in more disciplines and we're also looking to bring together the community of developers that develop these platforms. So it's a community of practice to help the developers support each other in developing and sharing best practices. Yeah, so that's part of our program. Hopefully we can get to the next slide. Okay, so in terms of the open call, the process we're looking to be transparent, we're very much looking to reward collaboration. So these are national scale platforms, national scale investments that will only work with broad collaboration. So the process is set up to increase that collaboration through the EOI process and I'll talk about that soon. And we're also looking for new entrants into the research sector, so that will help increase the diversity of platforms. Sorry, I'm just having trouble advancing my slides today. So the scope of the program, I'll just talk about what's out of scope to start with. We're not looking for the development of new platforms from scratch, so that's a completely new idea with a bespoke development that is out of scope and so is purchasing commercial off the shelf solutions. So what we are looking for is projects that look to adopt an existing platform that for instance something that is used successfully by a community overseas and the Australian community wants to adopt that same platform here. It could be adaptation of existing platform that works for one supplemental research area and it's being adapted for a different research area and the work there would be associating new data sources and new tools into that platform technology. We in scope is also support for adoption of a relatively generic platform solution, that could be one of the OSF platform or hub zero, something like that. Existing platforms, if you're looking to re-engineer them to make them more sustainable, that is in scope. So looking to adopt shared services such as authentication services or moving to a microservices architecture and as well as operational specific services or microservices that can be integrated into other platforms. Okay, so the projects can be up to two and a half years in duration, so between one and two and a half years they'll need to end by June 2023. The proposals can ask for up to one million dollars with ARDC investment pro projects, so for a two and a half year project that works out to four hundred thousand per year, so four hundred thousand dollars for the first two culling years and then two hundred thousand for the last six months. Unlike last year's open call, a one-to-one cash co-investment in partners isn't mandatory, but, and that's in response to the COVID-19 situation with cash flow issues with a lot of partners, but the level of co-investment is still part of the proposal evaluation. We obviously need a legal entity as the lead to sign the contracts and it's just a heads-up that we're not planning on having an open call in a next year for platforms, so last year there was a possibility that we might have three platforms open calls, but at this stage we're just planning. This is the last one, so there are three phases. We're just about to enter the EOI phase, or the EOI will open on the 7th of July. This is the collaborative phase. This is where we are looking for people to put up their ideas as EOIs. The EOIs will be published on our website after the 24th of July and this is where people will be able to see what each other is doing and come together into a larger-scale proposal. We are taking an active facilitation role in this collaboration phase, so from the time that the first EOI is submitted until the 31st of August, the day before the RFP opens, ARDC will be facilitating conversations between the EOI proposers and this can also be initiated by the applicants themselves, so if there's another EOI that you see that is relevant to yours, you're very welcome to contact them and start those conversations yourselves. As well as other people who haven't submitted EOIs could contact the EOI leads as potential collaborators. The RFP phase will open on the 1st of September, running through to the 18th. This is a competitive phase. It requires much more detailed documentation and once that opens, ARDC can no longer assist with the development proposals. You can still ask questions about the documentation itself, but we can't give you detailed specific feedback on your proposal. So what are we looking for when we talk about coordinating between EOIs? We'll be looking out for relevant groupings of disciplines and research areas. It might be similar data types, similar data challenges even from across disciplines, similar instruments that the data is coming off, similar software tools or platform technologies and also opportunities for use of shared services, such as authentication or container orchestration services. Okay, so for those of you who put in that application last year, I wanted to let you know that the selection criteria and questions have changed and please do see the RFP documentation if you haven't already. The EOI and proposal forms are there in the appendices. So the reason we've done this is we wanted the selection criteria to really more closely align with our objectives for the program. We're hoping that the proposal template gives people an opportunity to more clearly describe what their project and platform is about. So please do give me feedback on those as you go through them. One of the big changes for the proposal is that we're asking all collaborators that are listed on the proposal to fill out a form to confirm that they are indeed a collaborator as well as for them to give us their detailed information. So that form will be automatically emailed out to them once the proposal is submitted and we're going to ask them for their contact information as well as what role that they play in the project. And if they are a key user, so that's a user that is involved in the development or enhancement of the platform that the platform is being developed or enhanced for them and for their needs, it will ask them for FOR codes. Their research comes under and up to three, up to three really brief case studies of what the platform will be able to do for them. So we wanted to give the users an opportunity to say exactly what they will be able to do with the platform to make it really clear what the platform is aiming at. Okay, so here we have the timing. As I said, EOI runs from the 7th to the 24th of July and we will start having conversations with people as soon as the first EOI is submitted. So please submit them as soon as possible. It gives you a lot longer before the RFP opens to really craft a great proposal. The closing date for questions is one week before the RFP ends. The questions can be submitted to me or on our website on the platforms page. There is an ask a question form and all of those answers will be put into the frequently asked questions that is also available for the platforms page, as will all the answers from today. So okay, so the platforms page you can get to ARDC.edu.au.com slash platforms and then follow the links to the open call 2020. So that's it for the overview. I'd like now to give you an opportunity to ask questions. So I'm going to try and stop sharing my screen so I can see the questions. So Andrew, do we have any questions come through yet? So we've had one question. Let me really live dangerously and share my webcam. We've had one question about co-investment where the co-investment needed to be even across all of the partners. And I said no, we were just looking at total co-investment lined up with ARDC investment. Yes. Now, can you see the questions now, Carrie? No, I cannot. So that's very weird. Let me make you an organizer as well and see if that solves the problem. So the next question was whether, okay, do you want to open the top of those? Sure. Sure. I'll just open them up so I can read them. They're tiny on my screen right now. Okay. The first question, should the proposal describe what users will use it for or should that be reserved for the user response emails? Yes. No, please. If you have a look at the proposal form, we do ask for how the platform will be transformative and or accelerate research. And that is those responses are provided in the form of case studies as well. So yes, please do let us know what the platform will be used for. Next question, can you outline what the features of a typical successful proposal from last year? So the questions. So the successful proposals were those that generally showed the highest transformation potential in the types of research or acceleration of research. They were those that had broad collaboration, including from the user communities. So the proposal participants were representative of the user communities. And they had strong governance structures plans and strong focus on sustainability of the platform. So strong plans for already enacted plans for sustainability. Andrew, can you think of I can actually send out, we did send to last year's applicants, I did send out an overview of what makes a successful proposal. So I'm happy to share that. Yeah. And I think that that's probably the best, the best approach so that everyone gets a consistent message because that goes to the people who are unsuccessful last time, as well as the people who are applying this time. Yeah, I might put that through the FAQs. Yeah, I think it's a good idea. Great. Can we have more clarification about what's meant by a new excluded project? So is that I'm guessing is a brand new platform from scratch? Yeah, I'm not quite sure. So Kevin, if you could perhaps expand on that, but if you mean, so when I said out of scope is a brand new platform from scratch, it's more, it's the building from scratch. So some of the, most of the proposals there will be an existing tool or university scale platform that is that people are looking to expand to a national scale. What we're what we don't want is the actual platform technology itself to be built from scratch. So we're looking for taking existing components or existing platform technologies and we're using those for your research area. Yeah, if I can just add to that, in particular, what we're looking to discourage here is what I sometimes call whiteboard proposals where people say, look, everything that's out there is terrible. Here's my grand vision documented on this whiteboard. I'm going to build it from scratch. We're not interested in that. So is there any advice on the size of the data set or platform that would be supported? So first of all, in terms of the financial investment, I think we're suggesting that the smallest per year amount would be 50,000 investment from ARDC. And that would be a very small project possibly around developing a component or a microservice or more set of microservices for platforms rather than the entire platform itself. And in terms of the data set, this is specifically a platform call. So if you are looking at collecting new data or compiling data sets, please do have a look at our Australian data at a national data assets programs, particularly the Australian data partnerships. And they're all available on our website. Can we comment on the weight of co-investment in evaluating the proposal? It's one of many criteria that we'll be looking at. And last year, we waited most of the criteria equally. I'm not expecting that to be different this year, although we haven't yet made a final decision about waiting. But co-investment is certainly not weighted out of proportion to other things. It's one other criteria we use. Yeah. And I would also, I should have mentioned that in early July, we'll be releasing an assessment guidance for the proposal. And sorry about the background noise, that was my dog. Yeah. So I'll be releasing guidance for collection criteria. So that should help. Yeah. And just to clarify what Kerry meant by that. So we're going to publish the criteria that we'll be using to assess the proposals, but also the guidance to the assessment panel about how to determine whether something responds really well to a particular criterion or poorly to a criterion or in between. So that you have a sense not just of what we care about, but how we'll determine your response to those criteria. Thanks, Andrew. The next question is, can we talk about what's included in the budget? So again, I will be putting out the templates for the budget in the milestone soon as well. But it's not, I can say what's not in scope is purchase of hardware, but labour is fine. And what else? I'm trying to think of outlandish things that people might request. I mean, our expectation would be that things like internet access and office space and that kind of stuff would be done as in kind through the partner institutions. We've had questions in the past about whether travel would be acceptable as something to be included in the budget. Yes, to a reasonable amount, I think is the answer there. So if you're, of course, this assumes that we're going to be allowed to travel again at some point in the future. But things like bringing people together for a user requirements workshop would be fine. Funding a two month world tour to visit cool projects that you'd like to catch up with probably less so. But those kinds of things would be discussions that would be happening with the steering committee and the governance of the project anyway. So I suspect the more extreme things wouldn't be likely to be approved by the project governance. Yeah, so things like community building and training are definitely in scope. And so salaries associated with creating and installing infrastructure and potentially consortium membership costs. So when looking at national or international scale research facilities, the use of those less in scope is or not in scope really is compiling of data collections. So, yeah, the focus of the project has to be on the platform. All right, just turn my video off. So another question about the one to one investment projects with investment more competitive, hence regarded higher. Yes. Yes, that's correct. Again, it's just one of a number of criteria concerning key users. Do you look for a large number here almost as a kind of user survey? Yes, we are asking for numbers of users and potential users to get an idea of the user base. It's not a selection criteria as such. We're more concerned with the users being involved in the in the proposal in the project. So, but user surveys, if you have that information is really, really helpful for us as well as helpful for you. But to pick an extreme example, if we had two platforms proposals that in all other respects were equally desirable, one was going to benefit five people and one was going to benefit 500, we would probably be more interested in the one that was going to benefit 500, because we're interested in maximising the impact of the taxpayer investment in this area. Oh, okay. So we mentioned new entrants. So can we elaborate on what we mean by that? Does it mean researchers who have never used ARDC resources or new challenges being solved? So, I would say new people that yet haven't received ARDC or our previous incarnations funding to build a platform. So for instance, last year, we haven't precluded any of the existing virtual laboratories that were funded under the Nectar program from applying for the platform's funding for for enhancements or expansions. But we want to make sure that new entrants that the people that haven't previously received that funding and having don't really have a national scale platform can be involved in and receive this investment. And just to nuance that slightly, when Kerry said funding, she meant investment. ARDC does not see itself as a funder here, we see ourselves as partners with the community in investing. And so if we look at the program, the projects that we funded last year, for most of those ARDC was the minority investor, there was no other partners than through us. Okay, thank you. Will ARDC invite successful EOI proponents to make a full proposal, or can anyone who submitted an EOI submit a full proposal? It's somewhere in between that. We'll be looking at the proposals mainly from a view of facilitating the collaboration conversations. But if someone puts something forward that is very much out of scope and that that we don't think could be combined with another EOI or or adjusted to become in scope, we will let them know so that we'll give them that feedback so that they don't waste their time in putting together a full proposal. But it's not the EOI process isn't intended to be a gatekeeper to the proposal. Do you think that covers it, Andrew? Yeah, but I would add that we do not want people coming a lot well. We will be looking, when we get to the request for proposal phase, if you haven't submitted an EOI, you would not be able to submit a request for proposal. We don't want people hoarding their ideas and then coming along very late in the process and saying surprise is what I want to do. We really want to try and make this as collaborative a process as possible, potentially collaborative a process as possible while people are working up their proposals. Absolutely. So the next question is, can educational resources be included on the platform? If I understand it correctly, I think the answer is yes. If you mean, say, datasets or tools for educational purposes, so to be used by students, yes, but the primary use of the platform must be for research. So the primary uses of the platform would be Australian researchers, I think is how I put that. And so I read that as can you have educational resources associated with the platform? That is, can you develop training materials, for instance, on use of the platform? I'm pretty sure Kerry's interpretation is the correct one, but if the question was, can you have educational resources associated with using the platform? Absolutely. The Eco Commons, which is one of the data enhanced virtual labs that we funded, had a very active training element to it, developed some fantastic resources there. And so that is absolutely in scope. And Eco Commons, again, got used by students across a range of levels down to, I think, undergraduate in some cases. And that's fine. I mean, that kind of serendipitous use is certainly something we'd welcome. But as Kerry says, we're primarily targeting research impact. Next. So a good question. How are the conversations between different potential collaborators facilitate ARDC? So I think in the first case, we will be going through the EOIs and looking for potential synergies and approaching those EOI leads and and suggesting conversations between them, which we will be involved in. And helping them find out exactly what they're looking for and what those opportunities are. So I hope that answers that question. Yeah. And my answer was going to be, it depends. Everything that Kerry said. And looking to help, I mean, if it would be useful to have ARDC staff facilitating a discussion, then we're happy to do that. And in fact, the National Data Assets program, we're quite actively involved in helping shape some of those proposals. If it would be useful for us to do that, this time around, we're happy to do that as well. But as Kerry says, we'll be deliberately looking for opportunities to bring groups together. That look like they're tackling similar problems or using similar technology sets. Right. So next question. Can you tell us more about the case study? So the use cases that we're asking the collaborators, the key users to provide really simple, maximum of a thousand characters. It's about 130 words on what they will use the platform for. So I had this type of data. I have this problem. This platform will enable me to do this. Really, really simple. And this is a change or this is an improvement because so that's really simple. In terms of the in the actual proposal itself, when we're asking for to provide evidence of the transformational potential of the platform, we're looking for, I think we've got up to five longer case study use cases. And it's, it's again, it's a similar it's the same format, but just expanded about what the platform will actually be able to achieve for the users. I'm happy to have discussions, have conversations with people about that. As you go to, as you look into that more closely. Is there anything else you can add to that? No. Okay. Because I'm looking at the next question. Oh, yeah. How is an inch, how is international collaboration evaluated in comparison to a national one? So I think part of the answer to that is that the focus for the use of the platform has to be focused on Australian researchers. So international researchers, industry government policy use is all really good. But the focus has to be on Australia and Australian researchers. But international collaborations are really necessary in so many fields. So I and being in terms of agreed community formats and community standards, having that agreed internationally is incredibly important for interoperability. So I don't think I'd preference one over the other. But, but this is the Australian research data comments. Yeah. And all of that, I would add, first of all, we probably carry, we probably need to think about the guidance we provide around that to the assessment panel. So that's a that's a good question to ask at this point. The other comment that I'd make is that international collaboration could mean two things. It could mean facilitating collaboration between Australian researchers and international researchers. And as Kerry says, that's absolutely wonderful and the kind of thing we want to encourage. But it might also mean collaboration with international platform developers. So one of the data enhanced virtual laboratories and indeed one of the platforms open core one projects that we funded was using a workflow technology called Galaxy, which is developed overseas. And so there's Australian investment that is collaborating with international investment around the development development of that technology. So I think we're interested both in supporting researcher collaboration, but building on infrastructure collaboration and from a sustainability point of view, working with international developers around a shared code base is more likely to lead to a sustainable income than an Australian group doing it on its own. Yes. I've just looked at how many questions we have, we are going to be need to be more concise answers. Noted. Okay, so will projects be viewed positively that adds to the capability or potential breadth of uptake of last year's funded platforms? Yeah, that one's tricky because the currently funded projects are not eligible to apply for this open call. But if you were using tools, so I think the answer might be no to that one. Well, it depends if they're building on. So for instance, if they're building something that takes one of the existing platforms and repurposes it for a new community, that I think would be fine. But if it's for the existing community, unless it's something that allows that platform to go to a whole new community still within the same system, I think we might need to talk about that one more closely because I'm going to use Andrew's hands. Yeah, so that's something we'd want to discuss using during the EOI phase. Yeah, and we'll try and clarify that as well. So for everybody, can you talk more about your expectations of sustainability? Yep. So if I can pick off this and the comment that Peter Sefton has also made in the chat. We, the ARDC, do not want to be investing forever in the ongoing maintenance of these particular solutions. We see our role as to kickstart things that will then demonstrate that they have value to a particular community and that community will take on and support them. So that's why we're looking at sustainability as one of the criteria. We're going to provide more guidance this year than we did last year around what we're specifically looking for in sustainability. But what we don't want is we don't want to invest in things that fall over at the end of the project period. So that's why we're pushing sustainability investment. But we will provide more clarity about that in the guidance. Sorry, I'm just answering one of these questions. Okay, so the next one is could the scheme support pilot work at a smaller scale that leads towards larger national level collaboration? It could, but you would need to think about where that, where that larger national level collaboration is going to happen. Because as Kerry said, it's unlikely that we'll have a platforms open call three. So if you are, say, proposing to do something small for the next two and a half years, you would need to have a good answer as to where it would go beyond that. Yeah. So next question, are existing resources like Ausli, AusStage, etc, all considered to be platforms already? If so, are they eligible for support? Yes, and yes. So yes, those that you've listed are platforms. Yes, they are eligible. When you say support. Yes, assuming that what you're looking, that they're eligible for this program in terms of extending their enhancing, extending, going to new communities, connecting to new data sources, new tools. So not maintenance, not maintenance and operation support. So can we confirm that project partners don't need, yes, project partners do not need to come from the list of eligible organizations with the exception of lead organization. That is correct. So only the lead for the contract signing needs to be one of those eligible organizations listed in the documentation. For collaborations, will it be possible to draw upon or work with recipients of previous platform call funding? Yes, I think we've answered that. It is... Well, so two comments. First, none of these are possible. We would encourage it. And secondly, we have a webinar next week where the platform's open call one project will be explaining what they're doing and why so that you can attend and see collaboration opportunities. And if you don't know about that webinar, please let us know. So if a previous proposal had been successful? So I'm interpreting that. So the question is, if a platform's open call had been successful, then building from that would be appropriate question mark. If it's the group that got investment last year saying, look, thanks for the million and a half we got last year, we'd now like to come back for another million. We would probably be looking at that less enthusiastically. If it was building on work that got started last year from a different group, then yes, that would be appropriate. Are there any requirements regarding OPEX versus CAPEX mixing programs? More specifically, is data curation and eligible activity? So what we said last year is that there is always going to need, well, often will need to be some data wrangling work done in the platforms, but it has to be a really small proportion. So yes, a little bit of that work or setting up the standards for that work, so maybe 10% of the entire platform efforts, I think is what we said last year, but if you're looking at a lot of that type of work and that's your main focus, and please have a look at the Ethereum data partnerships open call, it opens at the same time as the platforms, and you can apply for both, but they will be evaluated separately, so you can't have interdependent proposals. You can have two independent proposals that would make sense if one or the other was funded, but so yeah, so talk to us about that if you've got something that's a real mix between them. What if existing technology is provided to obsolete? Will that be taken into account from a technical point of view? Can I do that one? Sorry. So there's a couple of ways you could interpret that. One would be a proposal that said, here's an existing technology stack, it's five years out of date and we want to rework it to enable us to do these cool new things. That's absolutely something we would be happy to discuss with you at the EOI stage, and in fact, one of the proposals we invested in last year was essentially that argument, it was a re-engineering to enable wider deployment to a greater group. If the question means, are we going to be looking at a proposal and saying, oh, you're using relational databases, that's so last paradigm. No, we will not be doing that. What can be included, not included in the budget? Can salaries be included? Yes, absolutely. Salaries are a very large part of the platforms development. Yes. Okay, so would it be possible to get specific feedback on a specific unsuccessful proposal from last year to help ensure that the emissions and the last proposal aren't repeated? Unfortunately, we're saying no to this one because we had such a large number of proposals, we can't give specific feedback to every proposal. What we can do is, if your idea is unchanged from last year, we can use that idea as a basis for the discussion, and with a view to how it fits in with this open call. That's what I've been doing. I've had a few people approach me and say, look, we've still got the same idea, we've got a couple of new collaborators, we've got these little bits of chain, what do you think? And we can use that as the starting base. So please do give me a call and we can set up a meeting. Both cash and in-kind investments are counted. Yes, they are. With the caveat that in-kind investments, so people's time needs to be... Or in the actual property or... Yeah, yeah. So in terms of if it was someone's time, though, it needs to be at least 0.2, so it's at least a day a week of their time. We don't want any less than that at all. But last year, when we were saying we had a one-to-one mandatory co-investment, we were only looking at cash. No, no, we did actually... It was the same. It was in-kind up to... It was 0.25% of someone's time. It was a quarter of their time last year. It was allowed in the end. It was allowed, but we weren't counting that against the co-investment number to determine whether it was one-to-one when we had the one-to-one threshold. We were. Kerry and I could have a conversation about this. Yes, it is counted. Okay, this is interesting. Is local participation or contribution to a new international platform currently in development within scope? I think I would say yes. Yeah, I would say it depends. I think it depends on how far into development that platform is and what it's using to... Probably the same criteria as we've got for the local... Is it completely new from scratch? Because that one seems to be quite... That's quite specific, that one. Cloud hosting costs, question mark. So I'm assuming this question means if I want to host my platform on Amazon rather than Nectar, could those costs be included in the budget? Yeah, I don't see why not. I mean, we'd prefer people to use the infrastructure that we have in place, but if there are compelling reasons not to, then yes, that would be possible. And in fact, one of the projects we invested in last year did do that. So it's clearly acceptable. And I should point out that the use of ARDC resources, such as the Nectar Cloud, are a guarantee for successful proposals. So, yeah, if you use our services, that you get automatic allocation. Can in-kind investment include provision of use of existing hardware setups to support development? Yes? Andrew? Can we take that one on notice? So thanks for the question. We'll get back to that individual. Another one about paying for cloud services? Yes. Okay, but staff time to make a data collection platform ready is in scope of budget. So yes, the data collection platform, yes, but the actual fact of the data. No. Yeah, so I'm interpreting that as it's the wrangling. It's making a data collection. Yes. Only a small amount. Yeah. This is absolutely focuses on platforms. We're happy to have a chat about how you could go about applying for the two different open calls. So, yes, please get that. Yes. Okay. Yeah, how do you, this is a, yeah, this is a big question. How do you expect the current contraction in university funding and the student COVID-19 and student downturns to impact on the level of co-investment we are likely to obtain for projects and how you ensure equity between universities that have more or less exposure to this instability in budgets? I think given that these are national scale projects, I would say that that risk is spread across multiple institutions when we're talking about universities. So I would say that's the way I would approach it. Because the, as we said before, the co-investment from partners doesn't need to be equal, equally spread across the partners. We're just looking at it on a project level. And to answer the first part, we do expect the student number downturn to have an impact on co-investment availability, which is why we have removed the number three one to one. Because requirement, because we do want to continue infrastructure development. We don't want that to be paused because of COVID-19. And to answer the equity question, I think we have to accept that there's always going to be different levels of appetite for co-investment across the sector. That was true last year, pre-COVID. It'll be true now. It'll be true next year. Yeah. Okay. It's looking to transition to a more sustainable version of a set of existing solutions in scope. Yes, it probably depends on why something is more sustainable. But yes, I answered that. That's what we did fund a project that was doing that last year. Give some guidance on how we cost in overseas partners' contributions. How involved should they be with setting up an Australian note of an international network be okay? Yes. When you say network, you mean platform? Yes. In terms of costs, yeah, in terms of what exchange rates and... It was just said earlier with the budget that on costs are allowed. So salaries and on costs and just use the rate that your university uses or the ARC rate. I think it's 30% for ARC. So yeah, I'm not sure about how we go about costing overseas contributions. So we might have to take that one on notice. Maybe get in context with Melanie. Is there value added to the application of capacity for international collaborations or there's existing ones? Yes, as we responded earlier that we see there's benefit in making it easier for Australian researchers to collaborate with international colleagues. Can you please elaborate on the intended user community is represented in the project selection criteria? Does that mean that the primary intended end users need to be project partners? That is preferable because what we're trying to avoid is technology push. So we're trying to avoid where we're building something that's a great idea that's going to make researchers' lives easier and improve research. But we don't actually include those researchers in the process. So that until you get down to user testing or perhaps a few workshops to use their requirements, what we're looking for is those users to have input right from the start. So that can be through being you could have some key users on the steering committee or technical advisory board or scientific advisory board. You could have already run consultations to get users involved right from the start or you could be planning to do those at the start. So that's what we mean by involved. So yeah, I think I've put in in the proposal documentation exactly how they can be involved. Researchers. How do we define researchers? Is someone who works at the government to run species distribution model a researcher? If they're doing research, their researchers is basically, so yes, government, even industry based researchers, researchers don't know they're not just in university academia. How are assessors selected? Are there representatives from different disciplines? Yes. We're currently going through a process to identify potential assessors and in fact, it's likely that we will be issuing an open call for people who wish to be assessors. Be aware that we recognize that many of the people in this space in Australia will have conflicts of interest and so we need to have a robust process for managing such conflicts. We're also looking to use a range of international assessors both because they bring an international perspective and because they're less likely to have conflicts of interest. I can't promise when we're going to issue the open call for people who would like to be assessors but I think it's highly likely that that's going to be part of the mechanism. Last year what we did was we essentially asked people who we knew and who we thought had the right expertise. This year we're probably going to be doing something a little bit more rigorous. Okay. I think we need to get up the line because we have another webinar coming up that needs to use this so I'm just going to quickly answer the last two. When are projects expected to realistically start at the latest? How long does it take? There's a piece of screen. It depends on how long the university solicitor or the solicitor at the lead institution chooses to take through the evaluating process. I would hope that we would have contracts for most of these things negotiated by end of March. Mind you that's what we hope this year and then COVID got in the way but three months in, six months in at the absolute latest. Okay so the last two questions. Is leverage across ARDC investment streams considered favorably? I think we need to take that on. I think I probably need more information from you and Nita so if you could send me an email. If you mean applying for different open calls, it's not an advantage or disadvantage. They will be evaluated completely separately. But planning on doing that please do get in touch with us. And is this thing exempt from indirect research cost recovery? So universities usually attach 35 to 45% overheads. I'm not referring to on-cost for salary. My understanding is yes because this is not regarded by universities as research funding. It's research infrastructure funding. Okay okay well that is absolutely for our questions. Thank you so much. Please do, this will be recorded. We'll send the recording out. Feel free to get in touch with me or Andrew if you have any further questions or submit the questions on the ask a question form. And we will try and get all of these. Yep thank you for your interest. Thank you very much. Bye.