FAQs

In accordance with Article 137 of the Financial Regulation No 966/2012 on Financial Support to Third Parties, the maximum amount to be granted to each Third Party may not exceed € 60.000 euro (sixty thousand euro). This limit applies cumulatively across all the StandICT.eu 2026 Open calls and the overall budget of € 2,925,000 (two million nine hundred and twenty-five thousand euro). In practice, an individual may apply and be awarded funding (Financial Support to Third Parties) under different calls, but cannot exceed an overall total limit of € 60.000 (sixty thousand euro) in funding.

The series of 9 Open Calls will be focused around the macro-areas of the key orientations of the Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation.

View the full list of topics for the current Open Call on the StandICT.eu Open Call page.

Potential applicants are standardisation specialists, defined as professionals with proven expertise and experience in standardisation activities e.g. previous contributions to standards developments, participation in various SDO groups, previous or current chairs etc in the respective priority area.

Individuals or natural persons residing in the European Member States and Associate Countries from both public and private sectors, industry and service companies including SMEs and start-ups, academia and research, and national and European associations, including NGOs representing consumers interests.

In particular, the target of StandICT.eu open calls are European Experts who:

• have profound knowledge in one of the priority areas covered by the Open Calls;
• have experience regarding developments of standards, e.g., in SDOs, , in groups set-up by the EC, or when creating documentation in open source developments;
• are not receiving support from other instruments (PPPs, EU or national R&I projects) for the proposed activities, and are not being funded from other sources for an identical activity.

In order to be eligible to apply for contributions applicants must reside/work in Europe or Associate Member Countries.

The proposals will also have to clearly demonstrate:

• Added value to existing SDO activities;
• Impact of work on European interests and the standard in question;
• Expertise of the applicant in the respective priority area;
• Expertise of the applicant in standardisation, e.g. previous contributions to standards developments, participation in other groups working on architectures, APIs, guidelines in the respective priority area

Please note that for the benefit of doubt, experts applying for participation and/or contributions to NSOs or ESOs will normally be rejected during the evaluation phase, unless clear evidence is shown that the former is relevant or linked to a broader international cooperation or initiative in which the NSO or the ESO takes part.

Each proposal will be evaluated based on the 4-criterion given below, with a scoring from 1 to 10 and the weighting indicated:

Criteria 1: Soundness of the proposal and foreseen impact on the Open Call topic (30%);

Criteria 2: Technical excellence & adherence to the Open Call topics (30%);

Criteria 3: Experience and qualifications of the applicant (20%);

Criteria 4: Economics of the proposal (20%).

The final scoring and ranking will be automatically determined by averaging the scores provided by three independent members of the StandICT.eu External Pool of Evaluators.

The proposals final scoring and the ranking final score will be automatically determined by averaging scores provided by the 3 independent evaluators.

You can submit the proposal but with the risk of this being ranked lower by the evaluators. However, StandICT.eu will review all incoming proposals and if we agree on the relevance to the DSM, this may be included in a later call with topics that capture your suggestions.

StandICT.eu will run a series of 9 Open Calls. Each call will be open for 60 days and will be followed by a 30-day evaluation period.

If your proposal was not selected for funding in an Open Call it will not be automatically included in the pool of applications to subsequent calls.

If you wish your proposal to be considered for funding under a subsequent call you can this again. We strongly suggest that you take the feedback provided by the Evaluators in the Evalution Consensus Report into account to improve your and modify the proposal before re-submission to improve your chances.

Also, please check the topics of the call as the topics of a subsequent call may differ from the ones the proposal was submitted to.

StandICT.eu has a mandate to provide the financial support available to individual specialists and therefore applications from organisations are not eligible for funding.

There are no such limitations. The project can only support individuals but multiple applications from the same organisation or research group are welcome

The proposals should be submitted by individuals and the activities covered by the proposal should be performed by the applicant. The proposal can reference the fact that is part of a collaborative effort but costs cannot be claimed for any other participants except the applicant.

Eligible costs are personal effort up to the maximum eligible EU daily expert rate of 450 Euro; travel, SSO or SDO membership fees or registration to an event . If you have doubts about a specific type of cost, please feel free to contact us to make sure it is eligible.

There is no requirement to present a cost statement. Successful applicants that are under Award will receive payment from our partner financial coordinator, Dublin City University (DCU), after completion of the relevant milestone to be signed and paperwork submission.

We understand that there may be limitations imposed by the specific SDO’s rules of engagement. We encourage individual membership but where this is not available, that of the organisational may be accepted providing this is well justified.

All applications must support an EU wide activity for the benefit of European society and well-being.

StandICT.eu has recently launched a mentorship programme, in order to accompany SME experts benefiting from StandICT.eu support into the standardisation ecosystem. More experienced experts (and notably returning StandICT.eu fellows) are given the possibility to be voluntarily put in contact with new fellows, matching their areas of expertise. This one-to-one mentorship programme aims to enable new coming SME experts with less experience of the details of the work to carry out in SDO technical committees to benefit from tips and advice from more experienced fellows. This also gives the possibility to experienced standardisation experts to diffuse their knowledge to a new generation of European experts, and enable the European Union to maintain a strong standardisation knowledge base for the years ahead. The mentorship may come through any way the mentors see fit – whether through one-to-one exchanges, sharing of resources, or invitations to relevant meetings and conferences, where the mentee can get introduced to fellow peers. A new question can now be found in the general application form, asking whether the applicant is interested in participating in this mentorship programme – either as a mentor, or as a mentee. The StandICT.eu team will then proceed to match the interested funded fellows from each new Open Call on the base of similar topics of expertise, and monitor the process. A feedback session will be organised at the end of the fellowship, in order to positively take stock of the various experiences and apply the required changes for the next Open Call cycle.” If agreed upon by the participants, a success story displaying the fruitful process between the mentor and the mentee will further be displayed on the StandICT.eu website, giving additional credit and visibility to the participants which accepted to take time in participating in this programme.

StandICT applicants can apply to the Open Calls without claiming money for personal working efforts as long as they provide the number of hours worked on the project, and the amount paid by the company for this effort. The company can provide supporting documentation, such as a statement or a support letter for the employer as evidence of payment.