One of COPRAS' prime objective is to facilitate, catalyze, and improve interfacing between IST projects in FP6 Calls 1 & 2, and ICT standards organizations, during the course of these projects' activities. It aims to achieve this by building a platform facilitating projects' interaction with the standards environment, and by assembling the "COPRAS Programme', encompassing those projects that are expected to benefit most from COPRAS' support, as well as from developing a "Standardization Action Plan', tailored to their specific requirements.
The first step in determining which projects would benefit most from being included in the COPRAS Programme encompasses the gathering of information from all projects, in order to ensure that those needing support can actually be identified and invited to participate. For Call 1, this process was carried out during the spring of 2004, and involved the gathering of publicly available information (e.g. from projects' web sites) as well as the gathering of standards related information through questionnaires, accompanied by a COPRAS Information Package. These questionnaires, that aimed to identify projects' standards and standardization related activities, objectives and requirements were send to 164 out of in total 178 projects in 10 out of 12 Strategic Objectives in this Call.
During the 4 months that the information gathering process was conducted, COPRAS managed to obtain a set of generic data on almost 95% of all projects in Call 1, while an encouraging 55,49% of projects addressed responded to the questionnaire, thus providing a large amount of specific standards related information (despite the fact that considerable deviations showed between the 10 Strategic Objectives). As this figure is higher than the 40-50% target the information gathering process set out with, it establishes a good basis for the work in WP3, focusing on the analysis of information gathered. Moreover, as projects that foresee standards related output are more likely to respond to the questionnaire, it can be assumed that the total responses represents a larger part of those projects in call 1 that actually need an interface to standardization, than the corresponding percentage suggests.
The information gathering process for call 1 therefore has been fairly successful, and COPRAS not only managed to achieve better results than it originally targeted, but also achieved a satisfactory level of detail, making the information gathered well suited as a basis for subsequent methodological steps towards building a COPRAS Programme. However, information gathering process also showed that some standards-specific information will only become available over a longer period, for which reason the information gathering process and reports should be seen as "living' processes and documents during the further course of the COPRAS project.