Governance
The EMIF is managed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The Foundation provides the secretariat and executes the decisions taken by the Fund’s Management Committee, builds and runs the Fund’s website and the application system, contracts and monitors the initiatives and projects supported by the Fund, disburses the grants and does the Fund’s accounting.
Management Committee
The EMIF Management Committee is established within the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (CGF) and is composed of three members:
The Management Committee is the Fund’s decision-making body. It validates all necessary measures to guide the Fund’s activities. It sets the Fund’s methods of action, designates beneficiaries and determines potential partners. It adopts the design of funding calls and decides on the awarded projects and grant recipients.
The Management Committee disposes the greatest liberty in its choice and methods of action regarding the projects it supports providing that these respect the Fund’s objectives.
Steering Committee
The EMIF Steering Committee, chaired by an EUI representative, provides general guidance and oversight to the Management Committee, notably by overseeing the external independent review and evaluation of the Fund’s activities.
The Steering Committee is composed of representatives from the EUI and the CGF, as well as from other Foundations acknowledged for their work on matters of importance for media literacy and resilience, and/or on EU matters, and of other renowned experts.
Evaluation and selection model
As a general rule, each admitted application is evaluated by two European independent experts of the highest scientific integrity and representatives of different stakeholders in the relevant thematic areas. These experts will have the sole responsibility of ensuring the evaluation of the application’s merit by scoring the selection criteria defined for each call.
The classification of each application will be the simple average of the two scores assigned by the two independent experts. The best scored projects will be discussed in a Selection Committee, composed of all the independent experts involved in the evaluation of the applications. The Selection Committee will establish a ranked list of selected projects by consensus. In case consensus cannot be reached, a majority rule is applied.
In regards to the “Actions in support of Fact-Checking”, if necessary, a third expert maybe called upon to assess the application, and the ranked list of projects is directly forwarded to the Management Committee for decision.
Decisions are totally independent from any outside influence, including from donors. A strict conflict of interests’ policy is observed. The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) has agreed to play a scientific advisory role in this process.