The Research Council of Norway operates an electronic submission system for grant proposals. It works quite well overall. Ok, text boxes accepting 3,000 characters should be larger than just four lines and should not scroll out of view when repositioning the cursor. Ok, columns in the budget table should follow the project period and should be able to contain large numbers for large projects. Ok, sometimes the fields do not apply to the type of project and are confusing. But, overall, it works quite well.
Lately, I wanted to do everything right. I went into the submission system and added project partners from the research council’s database of organizations. The database contains the correct organization names, address, and organization number. When I picked NTNU’s faculty of information technology, mathematics, and electrical engineering, it looked fine. When I clicked on „submit grant application“, the system complained that the name of the department was longer than 50 characters which seems to be the maximum length for the field. However, the field was displayed read-only, so I could not go in and shorten the name. Very unfortunate if it happens shortly before the system closes for submissions.
I found a workaround. I added another partner, opted to not look up details in the system’s database, and entered all contact details manually.
