Management of EU FP7 calls

JHEP is project funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme FP7) to coordinate the implementation of a Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) on Cultural Heritage and Global Change. The project has involved a number of ministries and public institutions of many member states of the European Union, coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism (MiBAC).

Within the JHEP project, MiBACT had the responsibility to manage two Calls for Proposals, so it needed a web application to receive proposals and to allow their evaluation by the contact persons of each European member state.

At the end of 2012, after a few months spent searching for a commercial software package, the date of the first JHEP call was very close so there was no time left to develop an application from scratch the traditional way. Livebase was therefore selected as the only technology capable to generate and deliver "on time and on budget" a cloud-based application to manage the call.

With the help of a senior Livebase analyst, MiBAC modelled, generated and deployed the application in less than one week, without writing a single line of code. The application allowed over one hundred users to upload their proposals and to record data about their own organization (including personal information about technical and scientific directors) and about partner organizations. By the end of the call, the system flawlessly collected highly structured data of over a thousand people, more than five hundred organizations and about ninety proposals.

Once the first call was closed (April 5th, 2013) MiBAC leveraged the potential of Livebase for evolutionary maintenance to extend the application with additional functions allowing representatives of Member States to evaluate the proposals received from a formal / administrative perspective. A second extension of the application, a few weeks later, allowed about one hundred international experts to carry out technical evaluation of the projects assigned to each of them from MiBAC supervisors, and to enter the results of their assessments. 

In 2017, the application was generated again from the very same model drawn four years before, in order to manage another JHEP call. The re-generated application included for free a number of significant improvements in functionality, usability and performance. In fact, the JHEP project still is a prime example of how Livebase applications are not only immune to technological obsolescence, but they can also transparently improve every time they are re-generated with the latest version of the Livebase application builder.