Report of the 1st national RDA Germany Meeting is online

On November 20/21 the first national RDA Meeting Germany was held in Potsdam. More than 100 participants followed the presentations and discussions. One aim of the meeting was to inform interested people and institutions about RDA’s activities.

On the first day of the conference there were many presentations to inform about the results RDA has yet archived as well as the governance structure that has been defined for RDA. In addition, some perspectives for the future work of the RDA-IGs and WGs have been discussed.

The second days of the meeting was dominated by the views of data professionals about the work being done in different scientific fields in German institutions (including a talk by myself and Benedikt Fecher). In the course of the second day, for me it became apparent, how different the research data landscape is, and how big the challenges for RDA activities currently appear to be.

The meeting generated valuable feedback for the future developments. Although most of the presentations are in German, the report that has been published some days ago is in English, as the issues raised are relevant for representatives inside and outside of RDA.

The report is structured by several parts: The first part is about some basic information on RDA (Chapters 1 and 2); the second part assembles aspects and questions mentioned in the discussion, but also demands for other activities or changes in the actual way RDA works (Chapter 3). The last chapter (chapter 4) deals with possible activities of the German members of RDA and especially important tasks they could fulfill in the overall landscape of RDA.

The meeting report is available here, the presentations here.