The cruicial question is what tax-payers funding should cover if at all in the IT-sector. To some extent EU-funds is replacing risk capital. To some extent it replaces market incentive. How many "distance education" projects is needed to develop a market? What are the "real issues" not covered in the industry developed products? My view of this is the conceptual solutions. The market tries to build secluded Islands of information services and concepts. Today based on the Web with gateways to traditional databases. In my opinion we need to etablish the true concept of distributed open information services. To do this we need experiments with different concepts and trials. What we don´t need is individual project projects with goals such as finding "European standards for x, y, z etc" --mats -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mats Brunell Stiftelsen för Kunskaps- och Kompetensutveckling Kungsgatan 28, 4 tr Box 3222 Tel: +46 8 14 49 45 S-103 64 Stockholm Fax: +46 8 24 75 09 --------------------------------------------------------------------------