In a narrow sense, excellence is about the best and is typically associated with special recognition: e.g. a Nobel prize in some fields; a gold medal in Olympic sports or an Oscar in the realm of cinema. In a larger sense excellence is about the best achievements, products, activities and best practices. Inevitably this entails a range. The upper part of the range is obvious and so it is easy to say what excellence includes. Those who have the first prize, the Nobel, the gold medal or the Oscar are inevitably excellent. In the world of universities there is little doubt that Bologna, the Sorbonne, Oxford or Harvard are excellent.

As in all domains, the lower part of the range is potentially problematic and so it is difficult to say what excellence excludes. There are always borderline cases. Anyone can call themselves excellent but that does not mean that everyone else recognizes them as excellent.

The network of centres of excellence for research and education in digital culture is not concerned with excellence in the narrowest sense: i.e. it is not concerned with trying to say who receives the first prize in their field, with their idea, their method or their product. Nor is it concerned with determining the precise limits of the range of excellence: i.e. it is not concerned with defining in absolute terms who should be included or excluded. In a continent as large and complex as Europe, trying to make an exhaustive list of every excellent research institution, cultural organisation, industry, individual, practice or product is almost certainly futile. There will always be excellent persons who will inevitably choose not to join because they do not like the idea of sharing, for lack of time, or for some other reason. The aim, rather, is to identify those who are generally recognized as excellent in various domains of digital culture and to focus on those who wish to share their methods, their resources in achieving a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Decisions for inclusion are typically at the level of membership. Core members need the approval of all the core members. National members are typically accepted by a national committee. Becoming a member typically entails three stages:

1) Researcher at institution signs a letter of intent to acknowledge that they have read the goals of the network and wishes to support them. They identify the number of researchers and other resources they wish to make available to the network, and specify in which activities of the network they will be active. This is sent to the country representative.

2) The country representative considers the proposal, is free to accept the applicant directly or may choose to discuss the applicant with their national committee. If a positive result follows, the applicant’s details are forwarded as a candidate member to the central secretariat.

3) The central secretariat forwards the offer to the appropriate group, which then decides how best to integrate these new resources. Once accepted by this group the candidate becomes a regular member. Thus the network of excellence is implicitly an open institution.

Sharing

One of the basic tenets of the E-Culture NoE is that members wish to share their research, resources and methods in order to develop critical methods together. Potential members will choose to contribute to one of the three objectives.

Objective 1:

Potential members must identify to which of the 12 modules of the DEED they wish to contribute and explain how their technology/solution/ offers something complementary to the existing module.

Objective 2:

Potential members must identify which research they wish to share, completing a form which indicates the size of the resource, transmission speeds required etc. They must develop a plan to show how and in what time frame the researchers from their institution will make their resource compatible with the DEED modules.

Objective 3:

Potential members will identify whether they will contribute to the research matrices at the macro-level, in terms of disciplines or at the micro-level in terms of processes/activities. They must show that their researchers have something to offer in addition to what the NoE offers thus far.