NordForsk kick off in Oslo

At the NordForsk kick off, Thursday 15th and Friday 16th October 2009, senior adviser Ellen Knudsen Rydberg of NordForsk informed the coordinators present, that there had been 86 applications submitted to the Researcher Networks call for 2009, and that as much as 30 of these got grants. The applications had been examined by two panels, one for the humanities and social sciences and one for mathematics, medicine and natural sciences.

Of the 51 applications that were from the humanities/social sciences, 16 were granted funding, and – as we all know by now – N'CLAV is one of these. The network has been granted 300.000 NOK per year for the three years 2010–2012. The funding is to be used for direct costs related to research collaboration and research training activities; in our case, there will be a yearly language variation field work and a yearly grand meeting on language variation.

N'CLAV was the only purely linguistic project present at the kick off, but there were some networks working with related areas. One example of this is the 3M Identities in motion network, working with the three Ms: Multilingualism, Multiculturalism and Mobility in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Erlendur Helgason, senior adviser and – in his own words – the main person of the network, stressed something that you do not tend to think about in the beginning of a network, namely the importance of having so called exit strategies. Since NordForsk only grant funding to projects, and never to organisations, it is at all times vital to bear in mind that there need to be a plan for future funding of the collaboration that the network activities result in.

/Maia Andréasson