Erik Huizer, Chief Executive Officer of GÉANT from 2017 to 2024, was succeeded by new CEO Lise Fuhr in November. CONNECT spoke with Erik to get his thoughts on his successful time in the role, picking out highlights and exploring his ideas on what the community does next, and to see what lies ahead for himself.
Erik, looking back over your time as CEO, what are your highlights?
I’d say there are several highlights: in the organisation, in the association and in the community.
In the organisation I’d say that the highlight was to create one common culture for the organisation. When I started there were several cultural differences in the organisation, that had just resulted from the merger between DANTE and TERENA. British and Dutch; hierarchical and egalitarian; process-driven and community-driven; and so on. However, I think it’s fair to say that nowadays the organisation embeds one culture across the two offices (Amsterdam and Cambridge) and across all areas of the organisation, often referred to by staff as: The GÉANT Family.
In the association I’d say there are many highlights. The first that comes to mind is getting the Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) with the EC, that is giving GÉANT stability for a long period with the GN5 projects. The growing popularity of TNC, now considered as the global community gathering for research and education networking is another highlight. I am particularly proud of the addition of the highly popular kick-off party and the CEO-track to the TNC program and the fact that we got to organise it in smaller countries like Estonia and Albania.
In the community I consider the continuing support for the Ukrainian NREN (URAN) as the highlight. The connectivity to URAN has been kept up and running and together with the Vietsch foundation we quickly established a support stream for URAN, to which NRENs could donate money. This money is used to help URAN in all possible ways, including buying generators and supporting staff.
I’d like to stress that all these achievements were the work of a team, and not just me personally.
What would you say were the main challenges in this time?
There were many but I would say the main challenges revolved around the following areas:
- Balancing the wishes of the European Commission with the priorities of the community. For example, there was a push by the EC to roll out the WiFi4EU program but many in the community knew it wouldn’t be practical or even possible for us to do so. In parallel, we were negotiating with the EC the FPA which would guarantee project funding for several years. Challenging discussions such as these come with the territory of course. We managed to convince them that we could not do wifi4EU, and at the same time we managed to get the FPA, guaranteeing project budget for a long time.
- Restructuring the organisation and rebuilding morale and creating one culture. Which we managed, thanks to an excellent Executive team and excellent team-leaders.
- Dealing with the COVID-19 years. Within the organisation we introduced support for working from home, ‘walk and talks’ as a concept to make sure people had someone to talk to, and motivational letters from the CEO to keep everyone informed and involved.
- Adjusting the legal form of the GÉANT Association to the present situation. Here I failed terribly. I tried for three years to convince the association members (the NRENs) that such a change was not only desirable, but also legally required and to the benefit of the members. However, I would say the culture gap between the Dutch legal structures that I proposed and those of the member NRENs was too big. I still feel this is a risk to the association that this is not yet addressed.
- Dealing with the Russian aggression towards Ukraine. This forced us to deal with geopolitical issues, which nobody ever wants, and unfortunately that meant cutting ties with Russia and Belarus. And it meant we rallied behind URAN and continue to do so.
What one thing would you change about the community?
For the community I would like to make it stronger on a global scale, such that it does not get ripped apart by the current geopolitical climate. I believe it is important that researchers and students can talk to one another despite political differences between their governments.
Looking forward, what is most important for the community to address?
I already mentioned the legal structure for GÉANT and in a broader sense the community needs to figure out how to keep working together in a divided world.
Where do you see GÉANT in five years’ time?
I hope that GÉANT will be a thriving centre of international R&E networking that is not dependent on non-EU suppliers, but that includes non-EU NRENs in its community to assure a truly global community.
The focus will have shifted to autonomy and security, which is good as long as it doesn’t mean we start to exclude NRENs and researchers from the community.
Finally, what’s next for you?
I still hope to be active in the community as an advisor or board member to one or two NRENs. I am working on an ambitious project to connect 10,000 schools in rural areas in south-eastern Africa to eduroam using the Uganda NREN (RENU) developed mesh router. Besides that, I will try to finish Netflix, read a lot of books and dedicate time to woodwork and similar things that require my hands more than my head. And last but not least: cycling and travelling, hoping to meet many of the people in our community still over the upcoming years.
