New Heritage fund complements, doesn’t compete with ARIM: CCOP official

A newly announced Canadian Heritage funding program to assist in the creation of new media research clusters shouldn’t be confused with a similar fund already implemented by the department last December (CNM, Jan. 23/02), says an official with the department. Ruth Bacon, manager of the new media content policy division at Heritage’s Canadian Culture Online Program, says that while the description of both the new fund and the previously announced Advanced Research in Multimedia (ARIM) fund appear similar, the New Media Research Networks Fund announced this month is less project-oriented than its CANARIE Inc.-managed counterpart.Over two years, the $8-million fund will award recipients a maximum of $2 million (or up to 75 per cent of eligible costs, whichever is less) to facilitate research into such areas as advanced interface design, speech interfaces, interactive cinema, techno-linguistic tools and broadcasting to diverse devices. On first glance, the fund seems very similar to the ARIM fund, but Bacon says the two programs’ aims are different. "In terms of ARIM, it’s designed for any applicant that has a legitimate research network project to come forward and get funding for (it). In the Networks fund, we’re looking at networks, we’re looking at groups of research-oriented applicants getting together and working in a network kind of environment. So you might have a university working with a private sector organization, or even a non-profit organization – whatever they can leverage in terms of research so that these smaller organizations who don’t typically have the facilities or the full depth and strength to put a project forward on their own can have access to facilities and other researchers and augment the kind of work that they would be able to achieve on their own. "While through the CANARIE program, you might conceivably come up with a group of partners coming together – and that would be great – this one wouldn’t deal with just one organization doing one project. It’s not designed to do that. It’s designed to do more a cluster environment and foster more of a leveraging of other resources." Documents indicate that the focus of the fund will be on applied research, though officials will entertain some basic research. Funding guidelines note that the program is available to Canadian organizations including SMEs, non-governmental research institutes, post-secondary research institutions with a research mandate, universities and not-for profit arts and cultural organizations. An as-yet undisclosed panel of experts will choose networks. Of the panel, Bacon will only say that its members will likely be chosen on the basis of familiarity with research granting programs, and research overall. Interestingly, a media release announcing the fund as well as documents describing it hammer home the theme of its related goal of developing digital cultural expression in both official languages. This spring, both CANARIE and Canadian Heritage were stung by criticisms by the Commissioner of Official Languages that they were ignoring linguistic duality (CNM, April 8/02). First expressions of interest are due September 30 as Heritage adopts an application process more similar to that of the research community for granting programs. Following the deadline, program officials will begin guiding applicants through the more formal process "so that by the time a full application comes forward, there isn’t a lot of lost effort in producing the right kind of documentation. This is something new that we haven’t done before. We’re dealing with a group of stakeholders who may not have a lot of experience dealing with this kind of process," Bacon says. At least two funding rounds, including this one, are anticipated, Bacon notes.

New Heritage fund complements, doesn’t compete with ARIM: CCOP official

News | 08/21/2002 4:00 am EDT

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