ICRI starts to be part of the world

The International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI) took place on 12-13 March 2012 at the Balla Centre in Copenhagen, under auspices of the Danish Presidency of the European Council. It was the first conference in a row of seven conferences on European Conferences on Research Infrastructures (ECRI), which was addressed to the discussion of international issues.

During the poster session in the thematic area of the Social Sciences and Humanities, DARIAH-EU (Fabienne Lorenz, Sally Chambers) presented a poster entitled „DARIAH: enabling digital humanities and arts research, internationally“. Fruitful discussions on the further development of DARIAH took place with ministerial representatives and colleagues of projects in the DARIAH environment.

In this new international attempt of European Research infrastructures, high-level entities expressed their support for a global framework substantially based on experiences of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), but also national model of other countries will be considered.

The development of international infrastructures, when emerged out of yet existing successful infrastructures of a smaller scale, or by integrating more and more observation data, or an initial international concept, do face the difficulties in their funding an management even more than on a European scale, as the chair of ESFRI Beatrix Vierkorn-Rudolph remarked, because Infrastructures are not projects themselves, with a clear beginning and an end. International Infrastructures should be a meeting place for talented people from everywhere, besides ICT, advances materials, ICT and sophisticated instruments.

And as the famous TED Talker Prof. Hans Rosling highlighted in his provoking but throughout compelling talk: Start to be polite to the world, start to be part of the world, because there will be far more people in the Pacific room than in the European or the American, defined as the Western World, and in the future we can consider number of people as power.