E-CAM Public Wiki and newsletters IV

This deliverable is an update of D9.3: E-CAM Public Wiki-like pages and newsletters III [1] and consists of: (1) an analysis of the impact of the revised dissemination strategy over the last five quarters; (2) lessons learned and actions to improve visibility; (3) a description of the key updates to the project’s primary access points; and, (4) the issues of the newsletters published over this period.

Regarding (1) the analysis was performed using web-statistics of the number of visitors to the E-CAM website over the last 5 quarters. The total number of visitors to the E-CAM website since February 10, 2017 (from when we started collecting web traffic data statistics) is 175264, with 39048 visiting our pages from April 1 2019 until June 30 2020, equivalent to an average of about 90 visitors per day. A large number of pages have been consulted (measured in terms of hits or visits). In particular, the calendar of events and the software repositories, which are core E-CAM activities, are consistently attracting high interest. There has been a noticeable surge of interest in Q2 of 2020 for our technical pages such as the scientific publications page and the training portal, with a 50% increase to the scientific publications page. Regarding (2), ongoing efforts to improve visibility include: 

• the promotion of E-CAM events which will now run online (the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs starting in early March 2020 led to a postponement of all face to face events due to the closure of universities. Some of these events are now being scheduled as webinars);

• collaboration with the FocusCoE to promote E-CAM activities to the wider scientific community and enhance interactions with industry, and public awareness of HPC;

• increase focused dissemination efforts regarding recent E-CAM Software development initiatives such as: the Load balancing library, HTC library releases, and an E-CAM refactored codes with exceptional scaling on massively parallel platform; and,

• improve the accessibility of the online training portal.

Regarding (3), we made an additional effort to display on our website more results targeted to the general public and industry and engaged in the following projects:

– a Comic book about E-CAM and how it enables modelling, simulation and HPC;

– an interview with Massimo Noro, Director of Business Development at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and former science leader of the HPC division at Unilever;

– a news piece for the EU Research Magazine targeted at all people interested in science;

– a common calendar with other HPC events running in Europe.

Finally, (4) is composed of all the issues of the E-CAM newsletter published during the period covered by this report. They were disseminated via our communication channels (e-mail, website, social networks) among our target groups. The newsletter is integrated as a News Blog in the E-CAM website, where material is continuously delivered and is web-search-able. In addition to opinion pieces, interviews and success stories, the newsletter also includes short summaries of featured software modules, case studies, scientific publications and deliverables. 

In the final section of this report we summarize our dissemination activities over the last year and outline our plans for the next one. We have also developed a wish list of enhancements for the E-CAM Training Portal so as to improve user accessibility. Collaborations with other players are also being explored to ensure the sustainability of our training portal, which we believe is extremely valuable for the community, especially in a period where events are running mostly online with lectures being recorded and stored massively.