News

June 11 will be remembered in the advanced networks and collaborative projects environment as the MAGIC day, because it was there and in the facilities of the French NREN, RENATER, that the project was kicked-off.

Counting on the participation of 29 representatives of 18 of the 19 participant institutions, the MAGIC project had its kick-off meeting in Paris during June 11 and 12.

During the two days meeting the project partners discussed about the different activities and tasks that must be carried out during the project lifetime, ensuring the participation of all the world regions.

Building on the success of the ELCIRA project, RedCLARA -with partners from Africa, Arab States, Asia, Europe, Latin America and The Caribbean- is leading MAGIC, a cooperation project which aims to significantly improve the ability of researchers and academics around the world to collaborate together.

MAGIC - a collaboration project to globally connect researchers and academics, aims to establish a set of agreements for Europe, Latin America and other participating world regions, aimed at consolidating and completing the building blocks of middleware necessary for the establishment of a marketplace of services and real-time applications which will facilitate mobility and the work of global science communities.

For its development, MAGIC features the participation of RedCLARA, (coordination institution – Latin America), GÉANT (Europe), RENATA (Colombia), RNP (Brazil), SURFnet (Netherlands), REUNA (Chile), CEDIA (Ecuador), CUDI (Mexico), RENATER (France), GRNET (Greece), CESNET (Czech Republic), CKLN (Caribbean), UbuntuNet Alliance (S&E Africa), WACREN (W&C Africa), ASREN (Arab States), TEIN*CC (Asia-Pacific), CAREN NOC – NITC (Central Asia), NIIFI (Hungary), CSIR (South Africa).

The kick-off meeting was attended by the project’s representatives, most of the leaders from Work Packages (WP) and members of participating institutions, who worked on the planning and coordination of activities, according to the calendar proposed.

The specific objectives of MAGIC are:

• To enable mobility and seamless access to services by: – promoting the establishment of identity federations connected to eduGAIN, – creating awareness of privacy and security issues, and – increasing uptake of eduroam.
• To enable the provision of collaboration tools and services among NRENs based on NREN-run applications made available via a worldwide application market.
• To seek consensus on interoperability of real-time applications and work towards the adoption of standards such as those proposed by the Global CEO Forum.
• To foster the collaborative work of Global Science Communities by actively promoting the participation of researchers in European Commission Calls, etc.

MAGIC started in May 1st, 2015, and will run for 24 months; the project was evaluated and approved for a grant by the European Commision within the Horizon 2020 programme. For more information about MAGIC, please go to: http://magic.redclara.net/