By Adamantios Koumpis August 29, 2023
CS-AWARE NEXT received support from the Horizon Standardisation Booster
Our project had the opportunity to receive advisory services by the HSbooster.eu that is a European Commission initiative aiming to provide expert services to European projects to help them to increase and valorise project results by contributing to the creation of new or improvement of existing standards.
As presented in the final expert report, ‘the whole HSBooster consultancy process with CS-AWARE NEXT went fluently and there was great support by the team of CS-AWARE NEXT to identify a suitable standardisation strategy for their envisioned project results’. It is also mentioned that ‘the CS-AWARE NEXT project is on a very good track’ and that we ‘have identified a clear and actionable target’ in terms of, amongst others, ‘adding an extension to the OASIS STIX public repository’. There is no doubt that this might potentially ‘pave the way for future standardisation impacts, i.e., the inclusion of the extension in the official STIX OASIS standard’. Standardisation is, as known to all of us that have been involved in one or some other way in such a process, a long shot, but also well worth trying.
Projects find it too challenging to take on standardisation activities, keeping their agendas focused on research results and demonstration of their validity and value in end user environments. However, and there is where HSBooster comes into the play: it aims to facilitate and streamline the dialogue between Horizon Europe projects like ours with the standardisation landscape and its main actors, namely corresponding Standards Developing Organisations (SDOs) to increase the European impact on international standardisation and thus eventually strengthen the European competitiveness in the most sustainable way.
Standards matter a lot and it is a pity that most projects fail to see an involvement in standardisation as part of their agendas. On the other hand, it is understandable as the life time of a project usually spans over 2 or 3 years, while the time scale for contributing and achieving an impact in standardisation takes sometimes even ten years. We may need to think about some new type of projects that will take this into account especially when considering FP10.