RDA’S 17th Plenary meeting
Despite the welcome news regarding vaccination programmes being rolled out in the UK and around the world, the uncertainty around in-person events is still unfortunately ongoing. Therefore, in the interest of this community’s safety and to allow for more clarity around session preparations, RDA’s 17th Plenary will be a fully virtual event. Following the success of Virtual Plenaries 15 and 16, we are confident and excited about yet another engaging event bringing the community together in April 2021. (10 January 2021)
The Digital Curation Centre in collaboration with Jisc and STFC-UKRI will be hosting RDA’S 17th Plenary meeting on 20-22 April 2021 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
RDA P17: Opening data for global challenges
One of the major strengths of RDA is the global reach of the network. Members come from 145 different countries and plenary meetings rotate around the continents. This diversity of collaboration is required to address global challenges and broker solutions that work for a manifold of different contexts. Richer outputs and standards occur as a result.
RDA’s plenary meetings provide an opportunity for this diverse collaboration to make rapid progress in all areas of its work – initiating and joining new working groups, sharing interim results from in-progress work, identifying areas of overlap and synergy, and presenting completed work and successful stories of its adoption. The outputs developed by RDA groups all aim to ensure that data can be shared and reused, and made more open, in global and cross-domain environments. This supports RDA’s vision and mission:
- Researchers and innovators can openly share and re-use data across technologies, disciplines and countries to address the grand challenges of society
- RDA’s members build the social and technical bridges to enable open sharing and reuse of data
Plenary 17 in Edinburgh will focus on the themes of global challenges, global mechanisms for data reuse, sustainable solutions with benefits for all, and global cooperation to realise these ends.
- How do you ensure global participation in the creation, relevance and use of mechanisms (technical and social) for data interchange?
- How can technology lower barriers to uptake – and when might it create barriers?
- What means can we create to overcome non-technical barriers to uptake, be they formal (such as legislation and workflows) or informal, behavioural ones?
- How do RDA values encourage diversity and safeguard the interests of all, rather than favouring privileged groups?
- How can global fora speed up research into crises such as COVID-19, climate change and bio-diversity?
The plenary will highlight several research use cases around global collaboration to address grand challenges and ensure societal impact of data reuse.
