Bringing the RDA Community to your Community

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21 Oct 2022

Bringing the RDA Community to your Community

Meeting agenda: 

Please Note: This joint session was merged with the BoF application Harnessing the power of the RDA: grants and other instruments supporting grass-roots expertise, knowledge sharing and community building.

The Session was renamed and the new application is here: Community Engagement That Works! Examining tools and success stories of pathways to Engagement in Community-led organisations at a global level


 

 

 

1. The RDA Community

The RDA Community. The RDA Community Development Manager will give an overview of RDA community groups, outputs and adoption stories. The RDA’s upcoming thematic 10th Anniversary series of events and activities will be presented in addition to the thematic community cross-fertilisation workshops organised during each month of 2023. 

 

Bringing RDA to Research Communities. As part of the EOSC Future project, the RDA has led efforts designed to facilitate improved awareness of open science practices, services, and resources available within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and RDA, leading to enhanced engagement with open science across disciplinary communities. One of these efforts involved a series of open calls for domain ambassadors who would form a helpful network of disciplinary experts to act as skilled communicators around EOSC and RDA within their respective communities. Some highlights of RDA’s engagement work will be shared followed by presentations from several current and former ambassadors.

2. FAIRsharing Community Curation Programme / Ambassadorship

FAIRsharing use case. The FAIRsharing Community Curation Programme and Allyson Lister’s RDA / EOSC Future ambassadorship provide a key use case highlighting the benefits of engaging with the larger RDA community as a way of enriching your own project/research community, and also by engaging our FAIRsharing community to enhance the RDA.

  1. Engagement with multiple communities provides benefits for FAIRsharing. The RDA / EOSC future ambassadorship enhances our current levels of engagement with these networks

  2. The Community Curation Programme: community building and benefits gained

3. RDA/EOSC Ambassadorship use cases

Current and former RDA Ambassadors have been invited to give short presentations about their experiences and how they affect the communities they serve. Topics include:

 

  • What were the benefits/challenges of being an ambassador for RDA and getting RDA messages and outputs back to your community? 

  • What support did you have for outreach & community building? 

  • What were the effects of your ambassadorship (maybe a better question for past ambassadors)?

4. Building Community Ties Panel and Q&A

  1. Community Stories: Examples of existing communities with ties to the RDA

    1. How did your community discover the RDA? How aware is your community of the RDA?

    2. What was hard/easy about linking your community to the RDA?
      Are there tools to help with this linking? E.g. CSCCE, OSC

    3. What does your community get out of the RDA? How do you make use of its outputs?

  2. Increasing Engagement from Communities to the RDA

    1. Engaging with early-stage researchers to broaden RDA reach

  3. Increasing Engagement from RDA to the Community. It’s harder to bring RDA outputs to your communities than it is to bring communities into the RDA.

    1. Putting into Practice: Bringing RDA outputs back to your community. How can RDA outputs have  practical implementations in the communities it serves? E.g. Data stewards are one entry point for the outputs to gain usage in many communities outside of the RDA.

    2. Usability and Impact of Outputs 

      1. Engaging Researchers with Data IG: funding to adopt the outputs worked positively in the past with regards to usability/impacts of outputs. How did this work, and could it be applied in future?

      2. There is a need for practical advice / educational material on how to implement outputs of the RDA. How do your communities (e.g. data stewards) make use of the outputs? Are they easy to find or do you just use certain ones of groups you know well? 

      3. How do you measure the impact or adoption of an RDA output within a community, such that it can provide meaningful feedback into its utility and inform the process for creating outputs in the future. What is the most useful form of output? What have existing RDA groups done, and with what degrees of success?

    3. Consider guest speakers from orgs/initiatives who have adoption stories to share (https://www.rd-alliance.org/recommendations-outputs/adoption-stories)

    4. What makes recommendations and outputs reusable? 

    5. How easy/hard was it to adopt an output in practice? What were the challenges? What were the benefits? 

  4. Panel and audience Q&A

    1. How have they ‘tapped into the RDA community’? Encourage attendees to share adoption stories for any recommendations and outputs they have implemented

    2. Ideas for increasing usage of RDA outputs

      1. The updated disciplines and spotlight pages are key to helping people outside the RDA understand how to best make use of its outputs. 

      2. What other ideas might the audience and panelists have? e.g. FAIR Cookbook recipes, infographics (would there be support from the RDA for this)?

Meeting objectives: 

 

The RDA creates a community that is “for you, by you”. Its members engage in a variety of community initiatives and may take RDA outputs and recommendations with them. However, it can be challenging to navigate the RDA, discover the outputs and identify groups of interest. How can you best implement the outputs on a practical level to benefit your research community?

This session will showcase success stories and challenges of engagement between RDA and the wider research data community. For example, FAIRsharing will be described in its role as a ‘facilitator’, connecting data policies, standards and databases with the research data community through human- and machine-accessible methods. The FAIRsharing WG has ongoing activities around community engagement (through the FAIRsharing Community Curation Programme, an output for the RDA / EOSC Future Domain Ambassador for standards, repositories and policies) and in descriptive metadata for both data policies and data repositories. Relationships among resources and stakeholders form the core of the FAIRsharing WG and the project itself. 

During the session, the FAIRsharing Community Curation Programme will be used as an example of how the RDA community and extended research data community can integrate and enrich each other through a facilitator such as FAIRsharing. The session will also highlight how the RDA benefits its members and other community initiatives. Examples, provided by current and former RDA Ambassadors and representatives from RDA WGs and IGs, will showcase existing methods of community engagement.

The RDA creates a cross-disciplinary network of researchers and research facilitators (e.g. data stewards, librarians). However, it proves challenging to connect outputs created by WGs and IGs to other research communities in a practical way. The RDA has been wildly successful in creating a network of cross-disciplinary researchers; this session will celebrate and highlight a few of these successes, and will also provide examples of the challenges facing its members when trying to implement its outputs. Finally, a panel and Q&A will attempt to address these challenges and provide ideas to solve them.

Short Group Status: 

The FAIRsharing WG is a maintenance mode, but actively works on the adoption of its two outputs: the FAIRsharing registry and the associated recommendations. The adoption is supported by three activities done in collaboration with other RDA groups:  (i) FAIRsharing Community Curation Programme (endorsed by the RDA), (ii) alignment of data policy features, and (iii) identification of common attributes of databases. 

 

The Professionalising Data Stewardship IG is an ongoing interest group dedicated to increasing collaboration within and outside the RDA community around the promotion of data stewardship as a professional role.

 

The RDA Engaging Researchers with Data IG is an established IG created to exchange best practices on how to effectively engage with researchers about research data. In particular, they can describe their recent outputs of the Cookbook, and the newest activity of podcasts that they have undertaken.

 

The RDA Early Career and Engagement IG is an established IG that provides a focal point for Early and Mid-Career Researchers and Professionals, including those involved in various RDA-related fellowships and Early Career programs.

Brief introduction describing the activities and scope of the group(s): 

FAIRsharing WG

To promote further adoption and drive improvement of the adopted FAIRsharing registry, the WG contributes to a number of activities with other RDA groups; these activities reflect the requests and needs of the community, and are open and inclusive for all stakeholders. The WG community network encompasses repositories, maintainers and developers, standard-developing organisations, journals and journal publishers, funders, librarians, data stewards, and other scholarly organisations and alliances.

 

Professionalising Data Stewardship IG

The Professionalising Data Stewardship Interest Group focuses on sharing good practices, initiatives, and projects that could help research organisations in professionalising data stewardship. It thus aims to stimulate collaboration within and outside the RDA community. Data stewards have always been a major stakeholder for FAIRsharing; the communities represented by the FAIRsharing WG and PDS IG are overlapping in scope, as both are focused on building a strong community of expert data facilitators. 

 

Data stewards have been working hard as part of this IG to get their roles recognised within projects as key people for creating and sustaining FAIR outputs. The efforts of both communities on network building and utilising RDA outputs makes this IG a great match for a joint session around the challenges and benefits of communities within and beyond the RDA.

 

RDA Engaging Researchers with Data IG

The RDA Engaging Researchers with Data IG is an established IG created to exchange best practices on how to effectively engage with researchers about research data and develop resources to help various research organisations increase engagement with their research communities. The motivation behind this group is to build social bridges that enable open sharing and re-use of data. As such, it is well placed to provide user stories on how successful community engagement with organisations and outputs has occurred in the past, and on how organisations like the RDA can increase engagement with their outputs.

 

RDA Early Career and Engagement IG

The RDA Early Career and Engagement IG is an established IG that provides a focal point for Early and Mid-Career Researchers and Professionals, including those involved in various RDA-related fellowships and Early Career programs. Specifically, the IG focuses on support with networking amongst themselves to learn about other Early Career scientists and their research, i.e., establishing a “network of peers”, and mentoring from senior RDA members who are interested in mentoring Early Career Researchers and Professionals. As such, it is well placed to provide user stories on how early career researchers have learned about and successfully engaged with the RDA, and how they grow RDA awareness and membership back in their “home” community.

Type of Meeting: 
Informative meeting
Group chair serving as contact person (responsible for the agreement with the corresponding groups): 
Avoid conflict with the following group (1): 
Avoid conflict with the following group (2): 
Meeting presenters: 
Connie Clare, Beth Knazook, Allyson Lister, Lindsey Anderson, Ana Slavec, Sebastien Denvil, Pedro Freitas Mendes, Francis Crawley, Romain David, Jaana Pinnick, Fotis E. Psomopoulos, Elli Papadopoulou