 So, any questions or thoughts arising immediately? Straight away down the front, I have a couple of people, please. Angela will wind her way. Sorry. Hi, my name is Deborah Dickinson, I'm from Freedom Studios. Three questions in one. Can you put in more than one application? Sir? Yes. Yes. Can you include international work in the applications working with other companies and other countries? Yes, so the bid must be led by an arts and culture organisation that's based in England, so that's the parameter we're working within, but going back to the point about partnerships, the arts and culture organisation may have chosen to partner with an organisation that's not based, an arts organisation that's not based in England or the UK for that matter, and likewise, the technology providers may also be partners that are not based within England. The key thing is that the grant that we're awarding will be going to an organisation based in England, for this particular fund at least. The last question. If you're already talking with researchers, for example, we are an academic institution and working on a project with them, can they become part of the bid or will you allot researchers? Yes. This has come up a number of times. One of the things when we were designing this R&D fund that we had to... One of the trade-offs that we faced was that do we stipulate that arts and culture organisations identified their own research partners in the way that we're doing with the technology providers, or do we try and build some other research infrastructure to connect to organisations with researchers, and their pros and cons are both ways. What we've decided to do is go with the latter of those two options. What we're doing is providing R&D services to the arts organisations. The reason why we did that was because some of the feedback we received, and certainly consistent with my own experience of working in these areas, is that not all organisations have those pre-existing relationships. What we're trying to do is really encourage, through our separate call for expressions of interest to researchers, if you're academics and researchers that already have a relationship, please respond to that expression of interest, because that will clearly leave you well-placed to participate in the fund. The other thing to say is that it is a call for expressions of interest to researchers. We deliberately haven't organised a competition at this stage, because what we want to do, this two-day workshop that I mentioned, and those of you familiar with the research council's ways of working, it's that building on the sandpit model. What we wanted is an intensive period which, before the actual researchers have been allocated to projects, there's an opportunity for all the researchers that are shortlisted to meet the organisations and the technology companies and really see if there is some connections and actually develop methodologies in situ. I'm hoping, through that route, we won't end up with a situation whereby we have a very strong relationship, pre-existing relationship, between an academic team and an arts organisation. That, in some sense, is sort of falsely, but there is that risk of that. The other key thing to mention, incidentally, is that the focus of this fund is very much on audits engagement, depth as well as breadth and width, and the business model side as well. Consequently, if there are pre-existing relationships between academic institutions and arts organisations in working in that area, then I'd doubly encourage the academics to respond to our expressions of interest, because that is very much the focus of this fund. Whereas, of course, there are many other healthy relationships between academic institutions and arts organisations where they don't work in these particular areas. So... OK. Can a university apply directly? Can a university apply directly? So, if this goes back to the issue of what an arts and cultural organisation is, and you can imagine, we had a number of instances of people saying, am I an arts and cultural organisation? And we tried to address, clarify this through our frequently answered questions. A university can, so, for example, in certain circumstances, if you, for example, have a gallery or museum, if you have a self-contained arts and cultural organisation, essentially, within a university, they can apply. Can a university apply, for example, if you have a practice-based researcher, in their own... ..as a university department? The answer is basically no. But Andrew, is there anything you want to chip on there? Because I know this is quite important to get the distinctions right. No, a university cannot apply. But a university is just a sunset. So, an independent, a functioning independent kind of organisation, library, gallery, museum that sits underneath the umbrella that a university can apply as an arts and cultural organisation. And we particularly made that distinction. It does sort of exclude some organisations that do consider themselves to be arts and cultural institutions, universities that are kind of dedicated specifically to arts and what not. But we have made that kind of distinction at this moment for this fund. OK. We had a gent here, I think, who was waving at me. Were you waving at me? Have you been caught in the three-fold question? Yes, it's Roger McKinley from Fact. You're going to hear from me a bit later anyway, but the third part of the question answered my question. OK, brilliant. Just a very quick one. Just a quick idea of the timeline for the call for expressions of interest from researchers. I'm not sure if you actually... It's live, isn't it? The call is already live. It's September the 2nd. Is that right, Angelo? But there is a separate page on the website if you want to look and get more details about what's involved. OK. We're trying to force you to ask a question, aren't we? If you go on. My question is because I'm Jenny Interport from Future Artist, and we worked for a couple of years now very much in the transmedian environment. Very much self-financed. And our thing is about raising audience awareness and digital business models. And we're sort of based looking more towards film. And one of the things I wanted to know was, for example, for us a natural partner would be somebody like the BFI maybe. Given the timeline, we probably wouldn't be able to have any confirmations from the BFI in terms of funding if we wanted to do some kind of collaboration on it, but would it be possible to bring them in at a later date and be a little bit ad hoc about it? Richard, do you want to tackle that? Can you go? Well, I love the idea of trying to bring the BFI in for a start. I think that's a great idea, and I hope that we can do that. I think the reality will be that the more confirmed the partnerships are, the more likely that we're going to be able to support the projects. So I think however much you can push to get clarification in advance of the deadline. If everybody goes away. So it's not going to be... That's the thing is that I might be able to get confirmation, but it might not be until maybe the first week of November or something. Which I know in terms of the application isn't necessarily going to help me, but if I was successful and then came on board within that project, is that something that would be manageable if I warned you beforehand? I think the best thing is to be clear, really. For this particular fund, the timelines are so tight. It's very difficult, frankly, I think, to work with that. Obviously there is a below line here, because if you've got an amazing testable proposition, which is demonstrape of burning question that everyone wants to know the answer to, clearly in that situation, one would want to treat that differently from a project which doesn't meet any of the other criteria. But I think the chances are, given the interest that we've had so far in the fund, and the size of it, I mean, I really appreciate the demanding timelines. Incidentally, it's created all sorts of issues for us. You can imagine in terms of getting things off the ground. But I think the key thing, again, is going back to what Richard was saying earlier about the wider arts council strategy. What we're trying to do through this fund is just to test if there are projects of the sorts that funders should really be supporting to promote and support innovation. And therefore I hope people would not put off developing projects like that just because of the timing. But I do appreciate that there's a real challenge there. My question is, if the BFI finance comes in after this is done, is that going to be okay? That's my question. Well, there's two issues there because there's an issue of BFI, part of you mentioned finance. So there's a second issue here about co-funding. So if an organisation bit, so £100,000 is the limit that's available for our activities. But of course, if an applicant wants to co-funding in, then clearly that's not a problem at all. In fact, the more other things being equal in the sense that co-funding will really mean a larger scale experiment, therefore it's more likely to more robust insights and that's a good thing. So clearly, if you're in part discussions with the BFI about co-funding, but haven't secured that, then certainly put that in, right? Yeah. Thank you. Okay, we've got one, time for one more. Gent in the blue. I'm sure everybody will be around. Members of the panel will be around to the rest of the morning. In fact, all day in terms of Hassan and Richard. Oh, sorry, where are we going? Oh, okay. All right. I didn't see that. We'll do two more. Hi. Sorry didn't see. Skyndor Huntall from New Art Exchange. Hello. I wanted to ask a question around the business modelling. Audience development and audience reach and deepening that relationship between spaces, communities, audiences, et cetera, is comprehendable. But when you refer to business modelling, what are you referring to in that? Yeah. I mean, even audience engagement in depth, I'm sure you'll agree. I mean, these are all problematic concepts. What we try to do is give definitions. So all these concepts I've just mentioned, they're all defined on the call and you'll see links. I mean, one of the things that we are, even research and development, frankly, is a problematic context in the arts and cultural context, because although the official definitions are very much grounded in science and technology, and clearly, this fund is not focusing on pure technological innovation. So the first thing is to say is that really, one of the reasons why we're doing the fund like this is to actually improve our own understanding and funder's understandings of what innovation, R&D, business model, audience engagement actually means. So with that big, big qualifier, the question on business models, we've deliberately gone for a definition from the museology literature actually. A broad definition, if you look through the link, it's certainly, we're wanting to allow for the fact that, arguably, all the organisations that are going to be applying for this fund, certainly some of them, are likely to be operating in mixed value environments, where they're creating public value, cultural value, however they want to think about their core missions and not just profits. So the business model definition we've got is actually rather broad, and it's from the museology literature, very much a public value definition, but do take a look at it on the website and see what you think. Can I just add to that? Because I think there are two practical things that we need to be looking at here. One is around the concept of sustainability and resilience and the degree to which arts and cultural organisations can use digital technology to enable them to develop their business model in such a way that it can be more resilient for the future, bearing in mind the reality that, in particular, public funding and other sources of investment may be reducing. So there's a kind of criticality there about how do we sustain the viability and the operation of arts and cultural organisations and can we use digital technology in some way to support that. Secondly, I just wanted to add that one of the themes very much talks about this in terms of efficiency and how we can use digital technology to help us to do things more effectively, more efficiently, and possibly cheaper. So I think it's thinking about those kinds of things when we're thinking about business models as well. So that's the theme we call resources, which I'll be a session on later on. OK, and Jent here, we've got the mic, and then we will have to wrap it, I'm afraid. Otherwise you won't get your morning influx of caffeine. Miles Goh from Miles to Camerata. I just have a quick question actually for Richard. I was wondering, could you just say a bit more about the relation between this fund and the 20 million fund that you talked about. Are they totally exclusive? You think they were totally separate, or is this a sort of lead-in preparation for the other fund? And also if you are successful for the Nestor fund, will you accept another application for the 20 million fund? Yes, it's very much a kind of learning moment for us. As Hassan described it, this is not a huge amount of money, but we do want to use it to learn from the kinds of projects and the kind of ideas that we can develop through it. And if you are successful in this fund, then that doesn't preclude you from applying for the other funds later on. We haven't quite specified what they are in precise terms yet, partly because we want to learn from what we're doing here in order to inform that. But I very much would see that the kind of ideas that we're talking about here are likely to drive into the larger funds. And partly because, as I said earlier, the demand is being demonstrated. The fact that so many people are interested in doing stuff in this area means that there's a lot that we could achieve across the sector. So I think we very much look to further investment in this area. Okay, great. Sorry to cut a discussion off as it got going there, but we've case studies and things to do after the coffee break. So we'll break for a cup of coffee. Thank you very much everybody on the panel. They are all staying around if you want to button-hold on with specific questions. And we'll break and if you can be back at 11.55 please, sharp, then we can kick on with the next session. Thank you very much.