Flex Funds

The flex funds are intended for direct distribution to the community. In the area of "Research Tools and Data Services", an annual public community forum on the "Further Development of Research Tools & Data Services in NFDI4Culture" is organised. In consultation with researchers from the various disciplines, the needs of the community are identified and proposals for research funding are discussed.
Over a period of four years, a total of approximately € 400,000 will be distributed to the NFDI4Culture communities through the annual forum on the "Further Development of Research Tools & Data Services", thus promoting user-oriented and sustainable software development.

2021
In the first project year of NFDI4Culture, the further developments listed below were carried out by employees of Task Area 3 (Research Tools and Data Services) during the Community Forum's set-up phase. The selection of these measures was based on various events to prepare the consortium during the application phase.
These measures are:

• Components in Pandora (image similarity search and integration of further formats in Prometheus)
• MEIGarage (modularization and further features)
• IIIF Annotation Server (Advanced Annotations-Plugin, Resource List-Plugin, Adapted User Interface-Plugin)

2022
The first Community Forum took place in November 2021 and the results of the forum were subsequently analysed. Measures that address a community need, for which there is no alternative free software, that can be developed sustainably and that can be implemented as part of a FlexFunds project, were proposed to the Culture Steering Board for funding.
Fortunately, the application was accepted and the following proposed measures can be funded in 2022 with a total of € 93,000:

• CollAna , collation tool for prints (report) 
• ConedaKor , documentation/optimisation of open source graph database system (report)
• 4D-Community-Browser, conception, realisation prototype (report)
• kompakkt ,  optimisation of 3D viewer and annotation (report)
• OpenRefine , data cleansing knowledge databases (report)
• TOSCA , modelling of application structures (report)

2023

The second community forum took place in September 2022. Following a vote by the Culture Steering Board, funding totaling €120,000 was approved for the following projects:

• CVMA, further development of Graphical User Interface
• CollAna, further development
• Linking Data einfacher gemacht, development of the graphical user interface of a web component
• mei-friend Editor, expansion of the user interface   
• 4D-Community-Browser 2.0, further development
• WissKI-Cloud, development of the possibility to easily set up customized WissKI instances
• iArt , Extending the project
• meico, MusicXML integration 
• OpenRefine, further development
• Kompakkt, further development