TERENA Mission and Objectives Statement
The Statutes of TERENA state:
"The objectives of TERENA are to promote and participate in the development of a high-quality international information and telecommunications infrastructure for the benefit of research and education. It will take whatever steps are required to accomplish that this infrastructure is based on open standards and uses the most advanced technology available."
These objectives translate into four core pillars of activities:
- Fostering New Activities
TERENA provides an environment for fostering new initiatives of the European research networking community. In this context TERENA can provide a neutral basis for investigating the feasibility of ideas and developing and piloting new services for the TERENA community and possibly the Internet community at large.
- Technical Programme
TERENA supports joint European work in developing, evaluating, testing, integrating and promoting new networking, middleware and application technologies. TERENA brings together technical specialists from TERENA member organisations and the wider European research networking community in task forces and innovative collaborative projects. TERENA organises topical workshops and ad-hoc meetings to exchange experiences and information, and to plan for joint activities. The TERENA Technical Programme liaises with similar activities in other continents.
- Knowledge Transfer
TERENA organises conferences, workshops and seminars for the exchange of information between TERENA member organisations and in the wider research networking community, and to make them and the Internet community at large aware of relevant developments. TERENA also pursues the transfer of technical and managerial knowledge to less advanced networking organisations in the countries represented by the TERENA membership, both on a bilateral and on a multilateral basis.
- Promoting Members' Interests
TERENA represents the common interests and opinions of its member organisations in contacts with governments, funding bodies, industry and other organisations. In this context TERENA advises the European Commission, national governments and other authorities on policy and technical matters related to support for the development of research and education networking infrastructures, services and applications. TERENA also liaises with similar organisations from other continents, promoting the European views and expertise.