Research Data Alliance Ideate Incubator (RDA-I2) : Conceptualizing an Interdisciplinary Research Framework for Strengthening Community Impact and Advancing an Innovation Platform

Ronin Institute For Independent Scholarship Incorporated, Montclair NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a global organization providing a community infrastructure of researchers, data scientists, librarians, practitioners who work within and across disciplines to identify and solve grand challenges of data sharing and interoperability. This project augments the RDA infrastructure with an incubator framework that can be used to accelerate data sharing and data-driven innovation, by providing targeted community support and strategic dissemination of community outputs. The goals are to establish mechanisms to integrate and link work across different RDA working groups and improve the discoverability and usability of RDA outputs. The project includes a pilot facilitation training program for RDA group chairs, to share strategies and tactics for building better connections across efforts. In a quickly-scaling organization, the chairs are uniquely placed as a consistent, visible leadership presence for all group participants. By equipping chairs with skills to lead more inclusive session discussions that give space to the knowledge of the many participants, RDA can better leverage the Plenary meetings to connect groups. A second goal of the project is to increase the intelligibility and discoverability of RDA outputs, to prepare for broader adoption of the RDA work. RDA's current process of documenting and tracking approved and supported RDA outputs makes it difficult to capture the full array of work associated with RDA, including publications, posters, lectures, webinars, white-papers, and adoption stories. Developing a strategy to better track output development and adoption would enhance the capability to support all group work and to monitor, measure, and disseminate the impact of RDA group outputs within the wider scientific community. In addition, enhancing the documentation of organizational outputs would improve the ability of group collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas, as outputs are reused and adapted to additional purposes, methods, and audiences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.