How to take part

Project Management Committee

In view of MORFEO’s characteristics, the projects developed will generally be promoted by an organization or consortium that will play the role of Project sponsor. The project sponsor shall be responsible for applying for membership, as well as for defining its organizational and intellectual property management model according to the respective Project Membership Form.

The project organizational model should comply with the basic organizational principles established in the MORFEO Charter and should identify a Project manager who will be the person representing the project before the Board of Directors. The Project Manager and Project Management Committee election mechanism will be defined internally by the project members.

The Project Manager shall have the following functions:

Represent the Project before the Community’s Board of Directors
Nominate new MORFEO members for the Community’s Board of Directors justifying the candidature by project participation.

The Project sponsor (initially) or the Project Management Committee (throughout) shall define the project organization that shall have to be accepted by MORFEO’s Board of Directors.

A Project Activities Report shall be drafted annually and submitted to MORFEO’s Board of Directors for evaluation.

MORFEO General Assembly

The MORFEO generally assembly is the community’s highest representative body and shall be composed of all MORFEO members. Its functions will be to:

Control the activities of MORFEO’s Board of Directors. The general assembly will be responsible for evaluating the community’s activity, annually passing the MORFEO Community’s Activity Report and the MORFEO Strategic Plan submitted by MORFEO’s Board of Directors.
Act as a consultative body, where MORFEO’s Board of Directors shall be able to consult the Assembly in its ordinary and extraordinary meetings about any decisions affecting the Community that MORFEO’s Board of Directors of their choice.
Elect members of MORFEO’s Board of Directors. The General Assembly shall elect the part of the Board of Directors members that it is entitled to. The voting members of the assembly shall be nominated by each Project Management Committee with one representative per project.

The General Assembly shall meet ordinarily once a year and extraordinarily as convened by MORFEO’s Board of Directors.

Community’s Board of Directors

The Community’s Board of Directors shall be composed of:

Elected members from the general assembly: These members are elected annually by simple majority by the voting members of the general assembly. In the event of resignation, the Board of Directors will elect
Advisors: The advisors are elected by the Management Committee as non-voting members.
Standing Members: Initially the standing members shall be representatives of companies or institutions promoting the MORFEO initiative, although the more active members of the community will be able to join this group subject to election by the then standing members. Initially, the standing members will be:
- Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo: Person in charge: Juan José Hierro jhierro@tid.es.
- Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Jesús M. González Barahona jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es.
- Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Person in charge: Person in charge: Fco. Javier Soriano jsoriano@fi.upm.es.

The proportion of standing members to elected members on the Board of Directors shall be kept at approximately 60 to 40, and the Board of Directors shall decide the exact number of representatives at any time. As there are initially 3 standing members, 2 members will be elected by the generally assembly.

This board is responsible for the managing the Community and has the following functions:

Decision making concerning the Community. These decisions will be made by simple majority, but any of the standing members is entitled to veto the decisions. This, combined with the extensive project independence, guarantees that the community’s structure and the basic principles shall remain unchanged over time.
Approval of Member Registration/Deregistration
Approval of Project Registration/Deregistration
Approval of the Dissemination Plan
Inspection of key documents
Project control: MORFEO’s Board of Directors shall be responsible for several management and inspection functions regarding the projects developed within the community. The key mission of these tasks is to assure compliance with the Community’s basic principles expressed in the MORFEO Charter, as well as to resolve conflicts within each project. The Board shall also be responsible for the analysing and evaluating each of the activity reports that each project is to submit, as well as the measures to be taken should these reports be insufficient to merit the project’s continued membership of MORFEO.
Catalyst of collaborations. The Board of Directors shall act as a catalyst of the collaboration between the different MORFEO projects and external projects, for example, managing MORFEO project needs, setting up new projects or introducing these needs as features in the roadmap of other existing projects.
Drafting of Activity Reports and Strategic Plan
Election of the MORFEO’s Director and MORFEO Office Head

MORFEO’s Director

MORFEO’s Director shall represent the community in top-level forums and on committees. The Director shall be elected by the Board of Directors every 2 years and should be or represent a standing member.

Morfeo Office

The MORFEO office is led by the MORFEO Office Head. Its functions shall be to:

Provide assistance for projects and Morfeo members
Define and carry out the Dissemination Plan
Coordinate the Morfeo Office activities

The MORFEO Office Head should also boost the synergy both between different community participants and with corporations outside the community, whether public organizations or private companies.

The MORFEO Office shall be able to be staffed by either MORFEO members or community collaborators. Criticality or MORFEO resources access shall determine what activities are to be carried out exclusively by community members.

The MORFEO Office’s key functions shall be:

Organization of events.
Broadcasting and distribution of news.
Liaison between MORFEO groups.
MORFEO forge and website maintenance.

The MORFEO office shall be initially funded by subsidies and voluntary contributions by members, and therefore members are not required to pay any maintenance fees.

Settling conflicts

The community’s goal is to encourage project independence. Therefore, the project management committee shall be responsible for resolving internal conflicts.
If there are problems between two projects, the board of directors shall first try to mediate to resolve the conflict. If no agreement is reached, the project managers involved shall have to appoint an arbitration board (five representatives, with an odd number of members) to be ratified by the board of directors. The decision made by this board shall be binding on the two projects.

Data Protection Act

The MORFEO Office shall be responsible for assuring that the community conforms to the data protection act as regards all the data supplied by the community projects.