I just stumbled on an European research project: Voster, which was about to collect, synthesize etc. some leading projects in the field of virtual enterprise, it lists 24 research projects. Alright, synthesize, sounds good for pedestrians, however, nothing to download. Somebody moved the files, if they were there, and that’s it.

Out of those 24 projects, 14 sites are unreachable, the projects’ results are nowhere, and one of those which are reachable, sells books.

So how is the pedestrian supposed to benefit from this work?
Let’s pick one unreachable project, BIDSAVER: Business integrator dynamic support agents for virtual enterprise, googling gives you a link to ist-world which recovers some info about BIDSAVER (an abstract and entities involved, but these are not results), and also points to the original records about it in cordis, still no results.

The archive serves us with some pages from BIDSAVER, wherefrom we find that “BIDSAVER will develop a methodological,technological and legal frame to support SMEs’ competitive potential through the constitution and operation of Virtual Enterprises (VE), joining geographically dispersed SMEs to catch business opportunities, and managed on the basis of competitiveness-oriented criteria by a new entity, the Business Integrator.” Wow. Impressive. Frothy.

The “methodological, technological and legal frame” is nowhere. I can bet it’s in a book you can buy somewhere. Or maybe that was just for those little private enterprises to get smarter among themselves, that would be good enough, but still, this project has been publicly funded and its results are hard, if not impossible, to find: where’s the frame which was supposed to support SME’s?

Crawled archives can help a little (in fact, they deserve permanent financing, like a public service), but these EU funded projects (their results as electronic documents) have to be specifically archived in some place where the public can access them, easily. That’s how the public can get smarter. We talk about knowledge society and still have this lame, serendipity based, infrastructure for preserving it.

In today’s real life a book gets written on the subject, a couple of experts get born in the process, they get invited in Florida to run workshops, on their own (read public funding) money, they become professors and issue diplomas in virtual enterprises and have stable jobs because the vision haunts them long-term. In ten years we’ll have experts frothing on virtual enterprises, meanwhile, the real enterprises do their virtual collaboration based on the intelligence of their IT guys or some non-IT guys who are using skype, or just buy stuff for video-conferencing and hire somebody short-term to install the cameras and show their visionary managers which buttons to press.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 1:09 pm and is filed under humanist, scholarly communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.