 Good morning all, be polite and introduce myself, I'm Keith Russell, I'm an Engagements Manager at the ARDC, I'm just here to answer any questions. If you have any. Joined ARDC here, I'm going to take this opportunity to hand it all the way over to Ian to welcome you properly. Thank you. Hi, my name is Ian Duncan, I'm an active manager of the ARDC, I'd like to thank you all for adopting the usual lecture position of all standing up at the back. We decided at the end we're going to have everyone at the back summarise through interpretive dance. All right, so today we have what we're trying to do today is give you some information and get some information from you. And so the information we'd like to provide is where we're at in terms of what the ARDC is, what we're going to be doing, where we're going to be going. And we want to test those ideas with this group. This is the first meeting of six going around the states, so we have Canberra tomorrow, we have Melbourne Hobart next week and Adelaide and Perth the week after. So please, we really want a lot of feedback and as much information from you as possible. So what we'll do for this first session, and I do appreciate that you kind of blocked out big chunks of your day to do this, is we'll talk a little bit about the background so that everybody of this has a shared understanding of where we're from and what the history is. We'll be talking about some of our partners, but not all of them and just outlining those. And a lot of this is foundation setting just to make sure everybody knows and everyone's on the same level in terms of what we're talking about. And that just changed. And then we'll talk about our strategy, or at least where the strategy is at the moment. Now, our strategy activity, you can imagine three organizations would have their own strategies, bringing two organizations is quite difficult. Bringing three together is really very difficult. And Michelle Barker, the director is just down here, is leading the strategy activity and looks much more tired now than she did when that started. That's a big piece of work. And so we really would like your feedback on whether you think we're taking the appropriate direction there. We'll have a little bit of time for discussion at the end. And I'm conscious of the fact that because I've been looking at these things so much, a lot of it seems to be very obvious to me. And so that's a good opportunity to say that what did you mean by this or what we're talking about when you outlined that. And then we'll have some questions for you to ponder. And we'll also have a poll. So if you wanted to get ready for that poll, this is the bureau at the top, that'll get you to the right page. Keith will be running that poll at the end of the session. And it's only it's got a couple of questions. But I think they're ones that will be very helpful for us, which I think will become much more obvious as we go along. Okay, so a little bit of the background. A quick part of Anchris, I assume, does everybody hands up who doesn't know what Anchris is? No one, of course I can skip straight over that slide. So Anchris was a massive federal government investment and has been reinvested in over the last few years. And this year there was a significant investment in the capital side. So Anchris had, it was on a sort of holding pattern with annual funding. And now we have the opportunity to move forward on the capital side as well. But that capital funding was not evenly spread over all the Anchris capabilities. So some Anchris capabilities got quite significant capital funding and some less. Some had road maps to know how they could describe their investment cases in the next round. And we'll touch on that in a little bit in a couple of slides along. So Anne's, Nectar and RDS. Is everybody here know who Anne's, Nectar and RDS work? So we was three of the e-research projects, you know, loosely describe e-research capabilities within Anchris. The two other, I guess, really significant big ones are the HPC capabilities, the National Computational Infrastructure in Canberra and the Portia HPC Centre in Perth. Now over the last few years there's been a lot of talk about the separation of those capabilities. So Anne's was a lot about the quality of data, curation of data, skills, workforce development, policy work with the government to describe frameworks that facilitated high quality outputs. And so they had a particular set of people they engaged with and a type of activity that was carried out there. Nectar was so initiated the network research cloud, which is the federated open-state cloud, and really was quite revolutionary at the time, particularly trying to do something like that on a national scale. Also the virtual lab program, which is generally regarded as being one of the jewels in the crown. One of the real achievements of our capabilities has been the virtual labs, now they've changed that paradigm of, you know, bench top, linking together a bit of software and data and making that a little bit more industrial and higher quality. And RDS had a very straightforward kind of mandate, which was data is an asset, data is an infrastructure asset, and how can we make sure that Australia curates and manages and maintains those assets as effectively as possible over time. So bringing all those pieces together makes a lot of sense, right? So you've got the data asset, you've got the Nectar cloud and the virtual labs which can act on those data assets, and then you have the quality curations, stewardship, and the long-term reuse of data on an issue of hands. So in 2017, there were still three separate projects, so I was the director of RDS and my colleagues, Ross, I'm well-consuming, Ben Maloney, the director of hands and Nectar, you were asked to align those activities as much as possible, right? So we came up with words to describe the common ground between the different programs. That was not easy to do, and some of you will have experienced the kind of spin-off of the difficulty in coming to some shared language and shared kind of initiatives there. Following that, I mean that was pretty successful. We had the data and hands virtual lab program as well as the research finishing up, very shortly. This year, we've been integrated into one virtual identity, so technically we're still three separate projects, three separate contracting agents. We now have one government supporting, so we have one board which is made up of members of the older groups, but we're acting as one organisation, that's the Australian Research Data Commons. In 2019, the intention is to actually become a single legal entity, so there'll be one contracting body for the government, and that's quite a significant shift in terms of how we relate to institutions, how we interact, so all of the AIDC staff, I think, are employed through institutions, and many institutions, I think, as well as some universities and other stuff. And how do we maintain that ability to be closely linked to the universities, while perhaps having a separate legal entity? So some work around defining whether a separate company is about ITU, or going to one lead agent, or some other kind of model, that's happening at the moment. But we certainly see increased 24 projects, there are plenty of different corporate models there, and we're trying to learn as much as we can from those. What do we do? We do quite a lot of different things, so across all of the different capabilities, this is, I won't read through the list, some are technical services, some are software services, skills and workforce development, some are little influences, so the policy work we do with the government, some are general uplift pieces, so coordinating community development and training activities across the different groups, and then we have the kind of, some of the bigger, heavier pieces around infrastructure at the heart, so particularly on the RDS and Megalosites. So the bit that people are actually really interested in, two bits. How much money, and where's the money going to go, and when is that going to happen? So this slide, this is the money we have for the next five years or so, about $110 million in operational funding, and about $70 million in capital funding. So that's a significant amount of funding. And one of the reasons we've not acted as quickly as some people would have liked, particularly around the capital side, is we were given very care instructions to spend this money carefully into a lot of time and efforts to get that capital allocation, and those two words are the pieces, be careful, just make sure that if you're spending the money in a way that the community wants you to sustain, but spend the money, don't hold onto the money, right, so we do want to get these activities happening as soon as we can. And where I say internal and external investments, one of the questions which we're trying to address is how much of the activity is actively which we would do as an ARDC internal thing, and how much of it is stuff that we do through partners. Currently we do the partnership model, and that I think we still see as an extremely powerful model going forward. Now, we've been reviewed to death. There have been that many reviews of the e-research paper. There are some around data, some around structural pieces, some around activity and interaction with the commercial sector. And so these are some of the pieces of advice that we've had. So this is not coming to you again necessarily with a clean sheet of paper and saying, what can we do for you? Because I think we've done that maybe every year for the last three or four years. This is saying we've got some ideas about how we think we're going to go based on those discussions earlier and these review pieces of work. Can you just let us know whether you think we're going in the right direction? Now, all of those reviews, were there consistency across them? Yes, they were. We're an integrated data intensive infrastructure, so that's one of our jobs is to work towards an environment which has integration across the physical infrastructure policies, data software tools and support. It doesn't mean we necessarily have to provide all of those things. It means we should facilitate and encourage and capitalize that activity as much as we can. Promote national coherence. So again, how do we make it easier for researchers to go from the desktop to the cloud to high performance? How can we make it easier for data to move between those pieces? How can we make it easier for trust in that data to be established and maintained? And why would we do that? So this was one of the pieces of work from last year in trying to develop some shared brains and shared language. So what's the impact? What's the actual output graph? Now, we live in a part of the research life cycle that's quite early. We're low down in the system. We're not the ones who publish papers. We've got a better roundabouts, but we do provide the tools and resources which should help you do those things. So impact for us is perhaps we have a view of where our impact model, where that line starts and stops. But we had these four transformations which are kind of the underpinning piece that we're trying to work towards. One, deliver a world-leading data advantage. And we can talk about that things a little bit later. Accelerate innovations that make it easier for the research community and our partners to innovate over resources and facilities to improve collaboration for borderless research. By borderless, we don't mean necessarily international improvement into state within an institution across different institutions. What we're saying is how can we remove the fricking for sharing in whatever form that is? And how do we facilitate translation? So again, translation is one of those things which is a real challenge. We can't generate the translation. Perhaps what we can do is create a framework environment that makes it easier for translations to occur. With the aim of making Australia's research sector as a community. Feel free to interrupt at any point. Now, the next slide talks about fare. So I'm just going to quickly go through fare. It's everybody familiar with the fare concepts. Findable, accessible or reusable. Used to describe data, generally. Increasingly around software and broader spectrum of pieces. We've taken quite a broad interpretation of fare. We've said, well, if you can have a findable, accessible, reusable data. Perhaps you can apply that idea to the other pieces we care about as well. So we've taken those four transformations. We've tried to break them down into pieces that are a little bit more actionable. So what are some intermediate targets? We can aim for and we can describe the framework within which people can generate fare. So we've said, well, it's going to make the data more fair. Make the infrastructure more fair. The research platforms. And the last one, which is actually for people with disabilities, is the message we get the most. It's around skills and workforce development. So how do we make sure that people are able to use the tools and are aware of those tools and have a way that's the best practice and have actually been able to do that. And then we would do that. If you've read the Ingress roadmap, it talks about the digital data and the research platforms, the elementary platform and the leader. And that's us. So ARDC, the Australian Access Federation, the RNX, the RNX and NCI. So that we've actually identified as a group as a sort of e-research. The e-research organisations that we already worked with so that a lot of the e-research nodes groups around the country, the NECTA and the IDS that we've worked with, institutions. We want to increasingly align what we're doing with what the institutions themselves are doing. So we do a lot of work through those e-research organisations. We've done a lot of that to be directed or related to what the institutions are doing and commercial resources. So how do we inject that commercial sort of hybrid model where it's a program? So I'm looking at that as well. And in terms of is that it? No. So we're really open to partnerships and then to anyone who heads back to these activities. So I can't go to all of the partners but what I will do is just briefly go over some of the, I guess really heavy in ones that we have where our focus will be on initiative, right? So the first one is we're partly in this network and so a major priority for us is to align our activity with our colleagues. So when we do engage in activities, we will look at whether there is an increased capability to align with that priority, whether we can work through that. So the increased capabilities often act as aggregators for communities or technologies or particular drivers and Shell and other people and who are going into all of the increased capabilities to find a similar discussion to what we're having now and say, what are your priorities? Where we think we're going out of those pieces of line and we'll bring together that increased conversation, stay connected to some of the available conversations we're going to have to present here. Hey, hey, cut. We'll have to make it a final document. It'll have some, we hope it'll have identified some of the really big priorities for people. And then we have our GDIP, probably, so that's pausing. NCI, Arnex, they're going to go, Arnex, you know, most people will be aware that Arnex is new and they're in command and they can really set it on priority and we provide it to them, something more value-added to the services particularly around storage. So cloud storage is a huge part of the products already and so much of what we have now is not much of an experience. This is something I can just answer. I should say it's really important to know and the Australian Access Federation. So, presumably we'll open to the AFR, they provide international researcher identity. We've done some work there around how we facilitate access of the non-research sector into some of these services. So part of that translation drive, positioning those resources to be able to get accessible from outside the sector, obviously important answers and interventions and AFR's key to that. All right, now we get to the meaty thing. What is our strategy yet? So I'll just repeat that question as far as I'm concerned. I said to you there, I can see we're quite laid-down in the research sector. What are the resources and some of the tools? Andrew's point was, from an institutional perspective, perhaps a little bit higher up in the institution to understand how they can exploit the benefits we provide to deliver that outcome for researchers. Okay, so yes, we provide resources and our intention is to shape that program around an alignment of institutions. Institutions understand very closely what the research priorities are. I guess what I was meaning by we're laid-down in the research sector is we don't publish papers. It's difficult for us to get the acknowledgments in various bits and pieces. But we can encourage people to make sure that the acknowledgments are made across that system and can link the pieces together. So we're not at the front end of research. We have an impact on people having impact. And I guess the same would be said sort of from an institutional perspective. Institutions run quite well to the hundredth of that size. We're slanted in order to produce the hundredth of pieces. I guess the leading background for the papers, the outputs. All right, so we've done some work with CYRO around their impact, by the way, part of the recommendations that was brought home, and really very useful for us. So that's... You get so busy that you're just busy with stuff you need to do because you need to do the CYRO impact framework because there's a really useful way of saying, okay, what's the impact? Why are you doing it? Essentially, if you've got a board all day long, as Tom Fosillo said, every step is so simple. Why are you doing this then? What's the point? And working from the end. So they have the triple bottom line as their kind of framework for impact for us. We don't actually have so much, right? We have impact on people who are producing economics, society, or environment, or benefits. So how do we describe our impact model? So we've kind of bastardised their model over time. We've drawn a little bit of a line around it, and we're saying, let's look at where we live and the pieces we can do. And the transformations, I guess, are currently at the description of our impact. Now, in the CYRO model, it's really very interesting that a lot of the things we assume are impact. Actually, our outcomes, they're the tools for this or an improved community for collaboration across different domains. But actually, that's not the real impact. Why is that useful for the world that you've done that? For us, so we've described some of those in the outcome section there. And this is very much a work in progress. So words may shift between all of these different pieces as we go along. But I guess in very broad terms, these are the pieces we're looking at and what will be of great interest to some of the people in this room are the first two, the resources and the activities that we've invested significant amounts over the last few years. We certainly intend to invest significant amounts to gain more. But resources, hardware infrastructure, we're not necessarily saying what we're saying is that resource needs to exist. We believe it needs to exist. We have two people doing some work around the hardware side of things and around the platform side of things in the virtual labs and the collections and the metrics that are available. We believe that resources probably will need to exist and those activities will need to go on. We don't know how we should necessarily do that. So we're certainly not starting off with an assumption that we would just continue resources and funding that in the same way we have previously. That may well be the appropriate way that comes out of this exercise but we're going to take a really good step back and examine all those pieces and make sure that that's valid. The reason for the cloudy bits at the bottom is that we have a pretty flexible view on what's capital or what's operational expense. We can operationalize a machine and we can also capitalize a person. So it's not so useful for people engaging with us to say this is going to be a capital exercise or it's going to be an operational exercise. More important is to say this is a value exercise. This is the impact we're looking for and we'll describe in the following slides how we are going to look at setting those stakes in the ground so people know how they can come and approach us. We do have those two big chunks of money think less about them as chunks of money and more about them as being a significant resource people can exploit if we can describe it in a way that fits in this impact model. This is a slightly busy slide. I just wanted to go back and say a recap we have these transformations we've broken that down a little bit into the themes and some of these are slightly more actionable pieces and from that we've said well that's nice we've got actionable pieces. How are we going to evaluate and describe how people can approach us to do those activities. So we have some principles surrounding those activities and the principles are described in various ways so it's slightly differently to the increased community but it's essentially the underpinning idea is the same. We're interested in innovative activities, transformative activities, activities that accelerate so that bring that community or the nation forward in a significant way. Activities are a national scope and scale so it's more difficult for us to necessarily see as a national capability how an activity that is just one institutional one group is useful unless we can see a way of translating that across a broader set of users and sustainability which is absolutely critical so that's been one of the challenges of the last few years was a huge upfront capital investment with no following capital replacement plan so that sustainability is really critical for what we do going forward. How do they all link together activities that fit into one or two or three of those pieces and then definitely things we'll be interested in. One's that fit into four fantastic. One's that fit into four and also sustainable. We have a ongoing sustainability around them even better. So you can see the sweets a lot there and that's so this is one of the things we want to test and this is one of the questions you'll be asked about in the poll is what do you think about this as a framework for trying to describe the activities and describe the way projects will work to an institution of possible institutions and the last one is as I said earlier in any of those activities we'll look at how we can leverage our inquisitive colleagues to deliver on those outputs but a quick reminder about what we do so long list of various pieces the reason I'm bringing that one up there is because some of the bits we do are heavy pieces there the Royal Tank is our current business our Publication Services so Hans has a lot of services around DOI so he identifies and research data Australia we have a lot of work around the cabinets. These are pieces that we have the collections the same thing not quite as old infrastructure but it's getting towards the end of what's our plan to maintain and hopefully increasing the volume and this one which is not as obvious if you can hear me please but we have our skills, policy engagement consultancy activities the policy activity is actually much more influential than I think people understand Hans is a very trusted advisor to the commentary that we put into policy development and that's obviously very vital and the skills part which is a huge program and we're putting quite a lot of effort into developing that and so these are all the really big many bits which we value those functions so we think those are things that have layers that we really need to continue to do do we need to continue to do them in the same way possibly if not like that out through these discussions and the consultancy yeah yeah yeah so that's an idea we tossed around so we have guidance on this and is that something we should put more effort into developing as a capability so is there a place for a trusted advisor on policy strategy infrastructure strategy and that's a piece we're looking at so we've got a reshaping arbitration as well to make ourselves more accessible so we can ask those questions I think we have people with great depth and breadth around policy integration and licensing of all of those pieces and how can we make those even more accessible but also those materials that can make them accessible to institutions so the question was is AIVC looking at making a policy strategy more available to institutions so this is the last important question is here it's great is that going to happen we have a pretty tight timeline that we set for ourselves of those major pieces of the strategy I'm afraid before release by around the end of December so don't think release before discussion we may do another set of these conversations just to check back on how that's going and the intention of how the finish the finish as it's now finished for us is program structures and how we're going to already started submitting that's great because everybody is able to find the link when your tablet is at it your Android phone we are of course technology that should open up the polling system there you will see a number of questions so we have 29 votes 29 so first question let's give us an idea about institutions and universities present institutions and universities the next question is around the draft activity principles Ian described those earlier and how they inform our activities and where we are heading so we're intrigued to hear which of you think is most important for the ARDC to consider any growing sustainability is coming up big I see sustainability coming out of 21 now everybody submitted to that one I have 39 participants 39 votes moving on to the final question which of the ARDC for our strategic themes do you think should be the top priority if you don't like the fair I guess you've got to go for skills we've been a fair in skills too sorry about that the question was how are we differentiating between platforms and infrastructure Ian did one that answered that so I was going to have to speak to his kids so infrastructure we're thinking more about the underpinning of resources so cloud storage identity some of those pieces the platforms I guess if you look at the data access services the virtual network that's right okay all the votes have come in fair infrastructure is coming out on a few more votes coming in fair infrastructure seems to be in the lead there we are okay so that was the last of the questions thank you all for providing your thoughts we'll capture those and we'll make sure that we have them for our ground thinking and we use these in the day and now I'd like to invite Ian to be able to put the next bit I've got a message from someone the funny bit is whenever you say I just want to summarize the Google bits and then the sound content so I guess I'll just have to guess the next bit is some questions which will be asked for you to consider hoping to have a little break out sadly the interpretive dance session has been vetoed we'll do that a different way we try to boil all of that down so an idea of what you think the priorities are you've got a bit of an idea of what we do a lot of you will have some historical knowledge about the things that Anne has done so if we were going to summarize or just really boil down the questions to what should we do more of or start doing what should we do less of or stop doing and what should we do differently so if you could just ponder that for a moment and then add it's a little extra bit into it how do we separate tactical discussion strategic discussion so ARDC has a kind of kind of finite life and we'd like to have as much value as we can during that period but we're not at the durability of the institution where does the institution want to go in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years where do they see these kind of priorities as line and maybe that is actually quite different to the transformations that we're talking about so I have a little bit of a think about that as well we now I think have some time for discussion so if anybody has any questions then just run around the microphone so my question in terms of priorities and in terms of conversation is how do you close the loop in terms of providing feedback for researchers that helps researchers advance their careers and what not so how does this impact the era, how does this impact the things that researchers and institutions are trying to optimize for so that different people aren't trying to optimize in fourth angle of directions so if I understand the question and that's one of the challenges we have so we care about the not least the government they've invested in data and tools and infrastructure and they want to see those things but you don't get the promotion because you're created a bit nice and you don't get it's difficult to get attribution and it doesn't those pieces don't work into an institution daily life or into a research so if that's a priority if that's a piece that people think is important and we do think it's important so we're developing a strategy around well we actually need to communicate this to the funders and say how can we build this into your workflow right and in fact the funders we've been speaking to are very receptive to that as an idea as well because they too are trying to describe their impact story they're even earlier in the workflow that we are and the thousands of players stuff happens and how do they get back again so we is that a good question now so first of all we're kind of evangelizing around the Fed secondly we're trying to work with the funders to say well how can we and in fact if you want to get institutions and be able to change their behaviour then you can go to the Fed and change their behaviour and how do we make sure that those less useful or less used metrics are built into that so how do we make it that you have this many T1 paper citations you have this many reference data sets you have these national collaborations out of the material which is so that's kind of behind the scenes gentle moving people in a different direction so that's the answer thanks the question from the online floor from Jason what the mechanism and timeline are ARDC looking at for institutional involvement noting the timelines they have for their strategy and so on do you want institutions to work directly to ARDC or for the research partners and what is the best way to frame our request for involvement ARDC being required as superpowers to do a capital less stuff the question the answer to that is you can approach this any time you like are we able to provide you with funding for anything not at the moment because we don't have a structure or process to describe those activities make sure that everybody gets a fair amount whether institutions are purchased through the research organisations or through an increased capability or as a collective or individually is up to them but you've seen the principles that we've described and you've seen sort of activities and the things that you're talking about and a collaborative approach is going to be probably the most effective approach the e-research institutions already act as aggregators for a lot of states and so it's worthwhile talking to their e-research groups about how they've got mileage, they've got experience in how you interact with this particular middle of the world so it would be sensible to talk to the e-research organisations but again as I said earlier we have a very broad we've got right from the door to partners so if there are institutions who want to come and talk to us directly we're more than happy to talk to them so the question was does ARDC have a position with regard to sensitive data I guess we don't have a policy on sensitive data we don't recognise that's a challenge and it's a very current question that happened researchers collaborate and will use sensitive data and our position is we would like to facilitate that activity so if we can de-risk some of that activity through resourcing or bringing different partners together then we're very interested in that again we're trying not to drive a research agenda or have a kind of infrastructure agenda except in as much as it responds to bigger national kind of priorities so we do have various people now approaches to sensitive data and various other kinds of different things as well so no we don't have that as a policy that's a good question I was just thinking about accessibility and how you see funding people learn from and the second is it's quite bumpy penetration some people they're very engaged and other people so I think we have lots of now trying to get through penetration and assistive data so I guess as I said earlier the original increased investment and that was very hard there was a lot of work up front with no real capital after that and the world is a little bit different now to what it was 10 or 15 years ago so we're looking at all sorts of different models for doing that so that's one bit how do we smooth out the lumps and that's exactly so in fact there's working on how do we approach that question in the context that we're at the point again for some of the research on this how are we going to make sure we don't lose something how do we broaden the pool of people who are going to explore those pieces work slightly into that question because even if we did do an upfront investment program we can create a structure in a region which says actually that needs to be very accessible to the maximum number of people in one of the conditions of that structure investment so all sorts of different ways you can do that as I said we have various people doing various bits of work and some of those threads will come together towards the end of this year and I think that would be useful in time for people to look up and say you've forgotten this about how the university somewhere that missed out on being in the club last time gets a useful allocation or useful engagement resources going on so it's over so it's over it's me following up as to this question I guess my views on these lack of sustainability of the last where we are now are quite well known to everyone in the room but I think we don't think of it for much further proof than the announcing its closing yesterday and of course having dropped out of Nectar and NCI having come up with most of its equipment for a contingent system as opposed to a national cloud to say that the current infrastructure of business model is broken perhaps except for those like in Melbourne and Monash's case that went the most out of the leverage so my question is sorry that's a comment my question is to what extent I don't hear anything about business model price or most importantly the idea of incubation or seed funding for sustainability as opposed to subsidy or hand out funding I think hand out funding hasn't worked so it at least hasn't worked it's not even redistributed across the country and so is there a move or a change in thinking to the idea of seed funding so some of these initiatives as opposed to here's some capital with strings attached in order to produce a sustainable business model that lives beyond the life of the project my question is absolutely I agree that the existing business model has challenges and different challenges for different organisations and institutions we are taking a completely blank piece of paper around how we do the next set of investments so you can see at one end of that spectrum might be the same as last night by machines or if you go more generating exactly the same challenges that we have now the other end of that is a biasing machine for anybody but you have to come up with a business model around the machine and we will do what we can to push a sustainability model through that so with the question of the business model we'd love that into the sustainability category so all of those proposals we're looking at have to have some idea of how they can survive without us and from our perspective we will be looking at things getting into things with a view of how can we get out of them again without breaking so that's a little bit on the business model side in terms of incubators we have that innovation priority and the transformation priority and absolutely that fits in there so different organisations collaborate with other people they may not be hungry for research teams using something you know we're up for anything if a community says we're in fact the best model for us is to subscribe to XYZ service let's run out of the US then we're able to go it's interesting what's just the standard around that that's the best thing we can do so we'll go we really haven't failed you on that and I think you know yes we'll be very clear on your time about the challenges around these business models because the people we deal with are not exactly the same some are very deeply subsidised for their institutions some are less so they're different business models how do we make sure that the bits we invest don't go common when other stuff changes around them so Max is the guy I'm talking to around the hardware side but we consider the platforms to be infrastructure we consider the data infrastructure as well so how do we create not a business model per se but a sustainable living model around those some of those it may be actually these are national assets we need them different we need to approach them differently for some of those businesses so the functionality is the bit that we think is really important so if the functionality you're applying that comes out of this is X thousand clouds of some description a whole different range of ways you can supply that you can go through a process that you can perform and if it is this data set is solid gold this is the piece that Australia needs to be competitive then perhaps that's different too this is a data set that is beautifully curated and it's fair but we haven't got a demonstrated company that's the way around it just yet how do we generate that so that we can bring that up as well so we're just just one at the back first so where institutions or institutes have common goals do you have approaches or processes in place to facilitate these collaborative national projects so whether it be something like this institute data frameworks or big data infrastructure in that kind of sense is there any process at the moment to bring that up unfortunately we don't have the process in fact institutions that again want to come and suggest ways that we can do that in an effective way that would be really helpful always remember that resources you can spend on X is resources you can't spend on Y so there is just the balance and one of the challenges with ARGC is we're kind of general capabilities so all those things need to balance together we're working on that process which will be guided by what comes out of these so for example if there is a very strong state-based step one towards a national seamless data world there's a state-based data as well and that's what we're going to investigate but in the context of that's great we might do it within a state but how can we make sure all the other states know that that's happening and have visibility of it and be involved in that process so unfortunately we don't have those processes I was going to ask again around the sensitive data we've been having a I think a relatively good time over here in New South Wales because there's a direction between eHealth and the University Centre you see opportunities for ARGC to be doing more to facilitate some more sorts of activities in other states absolutely so I think we're very interested in so those kind of transformative exercises that are a bunch of people with shared interests quite often they're exactly the same sets of shared interests that other people have to so the community development part of a very keen on being involved or having visibility into the actual you may have some policy models that work very well we're very interested in how we can translate those into a national model anything else? good alright I think we're almost playing on time we're a bit over good alright so the next session was going to be around breaking groups into groups to talk about what I've spoken about some questions we've had and these would really rather leave it to the winner back to you this was to give people some talking points we've done on this to be just what you talk about what we want is to not have people doing their part in not talking about anything which we have more reform or use for more relevant groups that would be really helpful I'm not really sure what the arrangements are just for the people we'd like to put back on you so we'd like to split you into groups of 6 to 10 people which is probably 5 or 6 groups there'll be a note taker of an ARDC staff member with each group which you're all talking about and from 11.30 to 12.00 we'll report back from each of those groups and then summary there's 3 core questions that we want you to see what we should do more of or start doing as in what should the ARDC do more of what the ARDC should do less on or stop doing and what we should do differently so in terms of splitting up into groups we had thought about doing it using the results of the survey by institutions the research infrastructure providers etc but even that most of you are institutions suggest we abandon that and simply do random groupings if that makes sense or if you feel there's some like minded souls from other English capabilities or government whatever that you want to form your own group with that's also a option otherwise if we could have one group of 6 to 10 people in the back over there one in the back over there one down the front here one down the front here maybe towards the middle end obviously in terms of numbers dear all I hope you're still on the line apologies for the audio there what I'll do now is I'll lead a discussion on the 3 questions that were raised in the end of the plenary Michelle just very briefly mentioned that there's going to be discussion on 3 questions and I'll be interested to hear your thoughts and what I'll then do at the end of this break this virtual breakout is feed your responses back into the plenary thoughts so the first question was around what should the ARDC do more of or what sort of things should the ARDC do as new activities or new things so please throw into the mix any thoughts what we should do more of or new activities there we go coming in through the chat from Mike I would like to see infrastructure made more accessible in terms of cost to smaller institutes okay if anybody I mean agree on that different other perspectives on that for example to get the good version out the good version of AAF SOS is 28k year SSO single sign-on and a further comment here is yes we need to be able to get easier access to HPC or cloud computing follow-up comment from Mike Baker on his earlier comment about accessibility in terms of cost to smaller institutes I then get asked if the money could go to a researcher's instead further suggestion I would like to see a focus on interoperability i.e. one point of access regardless of source coupled with one point of discoverability okay well then I have a question back to CAC so is that when you say a focus on interoperability one point of access are you talking about access to data or tools or platforms infrastructure any thoughts then research outputs okay one point of access to research outputs regardless of source research outputs of every description I'm guessing that means not just data but a whole range of research outputs okay one further point access to tools to support research outputs would also be a fantastic asset groups of assets any other thoughts on what we should do more of or new activities we should focus on okay in that case I'll move on to the next question and the next question is what should the ARDC do less of what should we end or should we just keep on doing everything we are doing okay that's one from Jason can't you just do more while not doing less of anything you know because of the infinite funding it's very good point Jason yes of course it would be wonderful to do just more of everything I think the other question indeed is if we do new stuff that usually means we would have to make choices about dropping off other stuff okay so in all seriousness as is Jason again building on that previous point about not doing less of anything in all seriousness ARDC has previously tried to make capital investments in infrastructure perhaps it could do less direct capital and more force multiplier in a way that ties into sustainability okay Jason do you want to elaborate a little bit on how you see for example that force multiplier tying into sustainability because as you've noticed sustainability is a point that comes up we see as one of the principles in activities so Jason likes this is to position for how we can look at using the commercial cloud options so Jason can you explain a little bit more how you see juxtaposition of cloud commercial cloud versus the role that the ARDC could play in that space okay so this is the position for how we can look at the things ARDC does really well is bringing people together and using things the things ARDC has done less well is translating its original capital investments into models that ended up being sustainable so Jason as I'm reading that do you mean that you suggest that we bring users together around using commercial cloud rather than providing solutions that might not be sustainable down the track is that sort of the angle you're suggesting there Jason you can unmute and just talk I didn't realise we were actually allowed to talk I thought we had to type everything and so I'm trying to type really fast but I can't keep up with how fast you're reading so I guess my thought process was in the past we've relied on ARDC and through the e-research partners with some capital investments for the stuff that we want to do and where ARDC succeeded is bringing us together to do something but it hasn't worked so well where it's been the sole funding source because then we've ended up in this situation that if ARDC funding goes away the service falls over and that ties in not just the infrastructure but the people to look after it so I guess I'm trying to point out the commercial cloud is one thing that I see we will be using a lot more of over the next 5 or 10 years and I'm trying to figure out how ARDC can help us get there without being the funding model for going you know you put a chunk of money in and once we've used it all up that's the end of the service that model clearly won't work so if you look at the institutions that are participating in projects in ARDC and there's a whole bunch of different universities I'm thinking of here many of them have cloud strategies and processes to use the cloud and the research part is the part that is the most difficult for those institutions to sometimes get a grip around but I'm trying to think of where ARDC could actually help and the money for helping that cloud space would probably have to come out from the bit where you're currently funding the infrastructure purchases in data storage in compute cycles that's my suggestion it's a difficult one because obviously it's had significant value in the past to people but I don't see how it can be sustainable in the future if ARDC were not to be around in 5 years okay and so okay if we're not funding commercial cloud cycles maybe where do you see the value that ARDC can bring around using commercial cloud well for research ARDC maybe has the ability and perhaps with some of the institutions and research partners are sitting down across all of those commercial clouds coming up with a deal that helps us for research and maybe some of the contractual capabilities and the scale issues I tend to think of ARDC in some ways the research equivalent of Quartet Quartet looks after a lot of the enterprise parts of what institutions are trying to do in terms of learning and teaching but Quartet doesn't necessarily have the depth on the research side and ARDC does have the depth in the context of the people that it's got from ANDS and RDS and NECTA and understanding the research problems in helping us move faster into that space that was my thought process originally okay so anybody any others any thoughts around that space if that makes sense do people agree with Jason or do people have other thoughts that say no that doesn't really bell for us I was going to say because there's no comment on my position I do like Mike's suggestion but the only thing I think is that isn't the outreach part of your ARDC normal model and were you asking us about what to do less or what to do more of at the moment we are now we were at the question of where we came to the question what should we do less of this is one of the questions about doing more of or doing differently so Mike's comment there about doing more outreach would be useful getting researchers who are not on the leading edge to make use of ARDC services so our question back to Mike when you say outreach do you mean outreach to researchers individually or do you mean outreach to organisations so that the organisations can then internally take that to their researchers and while Mike is typing I decided to unmute myself as well so for example I can see a number of research groups within my own institution who I think would benefit from the types of services that you have but I'm not well placed to hold their hand and get them on I can sort of make those initial connections perhaps between them and the people running the services but then I need the people running the services to have the time to help them get set up because I'm often seeing people who may have never used autonomous computing or may have never used a virtual laboratory and my experience has been I don't want to label everybody in the same way but there are many people who really need perhaps don't have the confidence and they really need that help to get them to take those first steps okay and the reason I'm asking that is because if ARDC provides services direct to researchers especially if there's questions, if there's models around that around costing for example that's something I guess we'd have to have a we'd want to engage with the institutional and the organization around that to make sure that pricing and the costing make sense and that the organization is okay with that model Jason you could read that one out actually Mike I was just thinking about what you were saying and I guess I wanted to specifically single out that Tom Honeyman as part of ARDC and previously does a significant work in outreach and we've had conversations where he's more than happy to come up to an institution to coordinate or facilitate discussion around ARDC so I guess I'm trying to work out is did you simply need to know about him what he can do or did we just need more Tom Honeyman's on the ground is what you were looking for to come and help have those conversations around ARDC services. It sounds to me that maybe I haven't been in contact with the right people and I need to know who the right people to get into contact with are if there are Tom Honeyman's around in the area available to us I'm sorry I don't know where you are Mike so I'll give you when you south well Sydney in children's medical research institute Sure so Tom's definitely the guy to talk to and we can take this offline and I'll get him to talk to you Yes for Mike I'm going to get you to introduce you to Tom, Tom Honeyman and he can help you out. I think a larger question there is indeed how many Tom's have we got and how much bandwidth does Tom having and is this something that we'd actually need more more of because that would then sounds like something would definitely sounds like there's an interesting continuing that and continuing that outreach offering but there's a question should we expand it and should there be more of it and should we have more time available for that so that's a question to all of you and I'll be intriguing your thoughts So Keith unless someone else wants to talk I was going to say outreach is definitely helpful but it should sort of be a time or scope limited activity and the reason I say that was because I'm thinking of ARDC services that outreach reaches into and training is one of the big ones right so a lot of the work that Ian talked about around fair will be delivered through training courses or applications and services that need to have fair and so on so the outreach will help to a certain extent but there comes a point in time where you go 100% of outreach effort only gets 1% more effect and so I would have said you might want to ARDC might want to schedule for 12 months of intensive outreach but taper off after that and more concentrate on the services that would be the feedback I'd provide And I think a balance there is that you need to have outreach about something so you need to have service underlying that so purely focusing on outreach with no content behind that, no services to offer That's a given, we're expecting you're going to have useful services that researchers actually want to know about otherwise it's going to be a waste of time and I'm going to ignore ARDC so I don't think we're questioning that you won't have useful services but I just thinking about the timeline and the mechanism, once you've reached critical mass I don't know how much more outreach effort you could put in because by definition you do want to get to some sort of critical point both at a national level but also down at that institutional level we should be telling each other as well I don't think outreach is just a problem we should be communicating collaboratively too So coming back to Mike's question earlier on about making infrastructure more accessible for more institutions so you mentioned AAF and getting access to AAF for single sign-on access to HPC other bits of infrastructure other bits, other angles where you see that at present it's hard to get access to the infrastructure or the services Mike is that something you're going to elaborate on or Keith are you looking for other people to provide feedback on Mike's point I would be interested to hear a little bit more from Mike but I'm also interested to hear from others if they agree if they have the same perspective as Mike if they have other other services or pieces of infrastructure that they would also like access to So Mike over to you and that would be unmuting perhaps So I was just using that as a specific example because it was just something that I was coming across last week where I think AAF has tremendous benefit and I want my researchers to make good use of things like cloud store etc but we have a sort of chicken and egg situation in that we're a small organization we're trying to follow best practice with all of our commercial offerings we go single sign-on and it's usually a no cost option because it makes means we can follow best practice and security and it also reduces the administrative burden on a small IT group but in order to do that with the AAF there is what is probably a trivial amount of money for a university but is one that gets picked up on in a smaller organization and ask that money be spent somewhere else so it's things like the AAF or the gateway to a lot of services for our researchers and I would imagine it was a fairly small amount of infrastructure money from ARDC's point of view to just make that available to everybody at a low or no cost option Mike how do you see that in the sustainability discussion because we could in theory fund for you to be a member for AAF for a year and how would that be sustainable down the track? Well yeah next year I'll be asked that same question again so it's just a I think it's a question having worked at a large university and I know that the cost of those things isn't even on the radar and then looking at a smaller organization it is more significant now what I could do is talk to the other members of AMRI and see whether listen to me somebody boy that's it. I think we've sent you sorry I would go back into the main makeers come up to the front things so if no people could come up one at a time and summarise where they got to in their conversations and we might have just adding the extra bits from each conversation we'll be bringing all of these comments together as well and then joining them up with the other state conversations too wow should start people talking they won't shut up okay Shush okay we had a really good discussion although it maybe should have been over Jin or something like that but anyway there was a bit coming out there so in terms of what the ARS DC should do more of and it was actually very difficult to capture the richness of everything that we talked about but in dot points our greatest support for skills and training especially in the carpentries being a source of peer review and feedback for data and software that can count as an ERA output engaging with professional associations to serve as a spokes organisation or to work with others to provide a leadership group that promotes software as a legitimate research output in online accounts for ERA um do more of the virtual lab program which was described as a dual in the crown but was also noted that it's only of use to particular disciplines as well and that is of course an issue should do more partnerships with institutions for joint infrastructure investments and spread the ARDC nerve around don't make decisions based on the host institution of the ARDC sorry it was open again that's right I noted down who said that yep inform researchers and partner with universities to encourage uptake of cloud store as opposed to one use of one drive and drop box that are currently used so that was the summary of what ARDC could do more of actually no one said we should do less of anything so that's pretty good so we just add that to our to-do list what should we do differently there were two points there make clear the way in which institutions can make a pitch to the ARDC for funding how does that happen and also improve communications as well as the availability for the Nectar VLs so there's a bit of a feeling that different institutions didn't actually know what was available to them in the Nectar VLs and how researchers can use it so that that's communication issue that we could improve that's it for my group thank you that group next we are old school pen and paper long-lived written work also allows you to shred it if things go wrong we started off talking a little bit about data because we thought that the group that we were talking with were interested in the way that data moved about the place this then transformed into a stream of consciousness I'm looking for the afternoon session I don't think we're sure to talk about so that's great a lot of talk about integration and the way that data and services particularly analytical services needed to join together a little bit more actually know that was a lot more so we're talking integration and the way that the virtual labs had at least started that off this moved into a very quick discussion about nature of EU research within an institution and how it is generally separate the ICT position of those institutions and that can sometimes be a barrier talk of national capability that is not met or falls flat at the border of an institution in many examples of that which you come forward that really caused the idea that this was an academic undertaking or at least a grown-up academic undertaking rather than ICT undertaking and that's quite important when talking to institutions in the role where the ARVC to act as a program between institutions at least the idea of attending and communicating the value of the national infrastructures and the government investments in those infrastructures that were available to them and then it was incumbent on the people who were using those infrastructures to communicate that to their institutions this saw an interesting behaviour of the movement of these sorts of institutional discussions moving from DVR to CIOs and that sort of that as a a lot of these values do correct me any of my team if you think I've gone wildly off-paste so we saw a big concern about the value proposition of the markets that ARVC is supporting and we need to understand that part a little bit more that led to advocacy that led to the value propositions services and infrastructures that have not been developed and valuable but also valued by the people do I miss anything after the transition? Okay so we saw the same themes that are coming up for the groups it seems but I think the group really started for actually a theme that ran throughout our discussion was transparency of processes especially around project ideas that vary on potential communities of practice and somewhat good lead for me around their engagement as well that we basically exposed what's going on and possible collaboration that we had both that we wanted more sustainable planning for infrastructure spending in particular but also to allow for seed funding smaller ideas that we needed to balance essentially sustainable practice and taking risks as well topic of acceleration came up in our discussion that that was important for some of the partners that we needed to basically provide faster possessed resources infrastructure and more frameworks more readily out of the frameworks side quest for those frameworks for those partners the suggestion came that we needed to have the possibility of more centralized services in total publishing that are sustainable we also talked about the possibility of having different rules different programs recognizing different real difference which means smaller projects and the local risk associated with those through to larger collaborative projects and I think that just there is anything I'm sure that you yes board services based on best intentions and understanding if perhaps the minds of our leaders being published in biggest journals thank you and interestingly we had a workshop just on touch on one of the things we spoke about there projects with little projects and how you can make the little ones make it as easy as possible to take off as quickly as possible care around them and things move around fast by hour, fast by hour not only that okay so actually in terms of talking about what ARDC should do more of we started off thinking about some of the concerns about that impact model and recognizing or thinking at least at this outline level that it looks quite linear and our discussion really wanted to concentrate on the importance of feedback loops and evaluation along the way to actually get to that level impact that is desired so we were quite there was a lot of interest in certainly picking up from what Paul was saying about being able to get through to that really level about how the importance and the impact of funding research infrastructure and that needs to actually be recognized as something as important as the research itself and how do we get that message through to people, to our researchers and to people at that dean and senior administrative level so then we talked about also even getting the talking about impact of research infrastructure itself so it got a little bit better for me there that's cool when we when we're talking about what ARDC should do less of there are some feelings about about that long nice way of looking at how some of the distribution of funding being a little hit and miss but the concentration of the discussion was really more about how do you look at funding across a wide variety of different types of service and then what that looks like from an institutional perspective and how we deal with the differences with those different capabilities that ARDC is responsible for in terms of what things ARDC could be doing differently there were we talked a bit about from the administration side of institutions we were fairly sort of public service that was our representation of our institution in our discussion and we were looking for ways that we might be able to smooth some of those institutional processes so that things like ethics committees may have better standard processes so researchers can get on doing their research being on the right platform so being able to push that question about what are the right platforms or what is the worthwhile kind of infrastructure and go back to that hearts and minds thing have we got this through to people about what it is to be and we did institutions are quite slowly going to increase this and such so maybe you would be better in terms of prioritising so perhaps we'll hear back a little on the innovation side and move on to things that are more easily scalable with of course some other sort of magical products for those high risk interesting things that actually could actually be available yeah very good there so this is the feedback from online no-potterspender solution so number of suggestions first of all to look at what are the questions what could the ARDC be more infrastructure services and making them more accessible to small organizations that raises some questions about sustainability would ARDC fund provide the services infrastructure but that might be a bit challenging but on the other hand there is an opportunity there for ARDC factors to grow and to bring together needs and to organize that another slightly related thought was bringing together the needs around commercial cloud so trying to explore what could commercial cloud or commercial cloud offerings be and look like and where the ARDC play a role in those needs interesting parallel where there is with portage and where portage operates and brings together needs portage does that more operational IT level and ARDC that all around research needs another suggestion around do some new things providing one point of access and discoverability for research outputs and finally another point doing more of continuing work in that space outreach making sure that there is outreach available to help researchers use all sorts of services infrastructure including HVC virtual labs and things like that and balancing that with institutions working together with institutions in that space so making sure that researchers within those institutions have access to more services and understand how they work and there's a balancing act between how much service to provide and how much outreach to provide the question should ARDC do less of anything so that would be lovely so there's a balancing act about how to do new things and combine that with not stopping the activities Adrian the group was really really me well just me no that was a very engaged group they really focused even on a couple of key things that they were looking to the ARDC for with capacity there were some things that the institutions didn't have the capacity for and some things where they had a capacity but they really wanted ARDC to build something a bit more coherent than the current system some coordination collaboration of approaches sharing of approaches so there were those two more themes there was a few examples of those for example the virtual labs there was a suggestion that we really make those very nationally all sorts of platforms that exist in institutions and some of the more robust institutions can be made into more accessible national platforms the galaxy is a very interesting area to really have something that's very accessible for researchers of every institution there was a design to not set up stuff locally, differently and if there was grays that the ARDC could help provisioning of resources and data analysis that you could point to or reuse stuff that would make a difference to the institutions that can adapt to that we were asked a very provocative question is the ARDC just going to make the rich richer and the poor poorer meaning you know well she didn't exactly say it but was it going to be the end result of this was just going to be that the the answer was obviously no as a national infrastructure one of the outcomes was that there was greater access across the world for everyone including the well-resourced institutions but it was really a question of how will we go to be able to deliver outcomes for the smaller universities as well as some of the others security of medical so medical data came up and that was one where where I think though what I heard was that the universities were saying we don't have capacity to deal with this sensitive data so we could all work together on this solution now that would be a really good solution we could just do instruments instruments there's a more coherent way of doing that across the sector we kept on coming back to this desire for a similar framework so for doing cloud implementation data implementation what is a framework that the ARDC can provide and you can keep back to the institutions either of them themselves or plug into some additional framework but they are more coherent it's for everything so this is an identification for people and parents and instruments and people and the ARDC bringing that information together across the institutions in a very coherent way as well as us for and then finally that we build a wall that people can throw tomatoes and plates and break things and all the things that they don't like they can just chuck it at us and then we would breed all together and make it into a nice wall but I think less facetiously a way where things are very difficult and the ARDC find a way of creating a solution creating something more coherent and I do the last break we of course talk about sensitive data as well but not just the storage also analysis the state heavy environments are in that better access for non university staff to that data so I am an entities for medical staff networks for medical institutions services and platforms so translation from them and maybe the role of the ARDC is to help them facilitate those discussions that are already happening so that's where we were earlier this discussion happening here we make that happen elsewhere and the idea was that ARDC could be the sensitive data for instance so you can neutral ground for having those conversations so as you came up there as well making the existing national questions more fair and so I remember that you could actually help me search for them and including archiving principles alongside the fair principles so preservation and disposal and how do you do that this data has to offer sustain for a long time how do you have this and then we talk a bit about the exponential growth in data making it very difficult so having letting people have mature discussions about disposing of data not just keeping it focusing on live data not just published data having more sustainability discussions including expiring dates from businesses and projects wrapping lifestyle management around and if we are going to talk about sustainability we need to talk about value in a way of measuring value so what services could ARDC buy from television that's the sanitation stuff that we know about and if you are going to wrap a project up having the ability to export data around what should you do less of someone suggested have less focus to consultation you know general webinars that explore should be more specific problems data problems and this is where they do more but have better coordination with others so for example there are other training providers well there's a good training provider here in New South Wales and Interstect we haven't actually had any sequence of approaches to partners together what should you do differently we don't know if things are sustained or how they will be shut down if it's innovation funding or script about focus maybe focus on the impacts rather than how things happen to more innovation looking at how to proceed and better national coordination of a platform there was no the audience in the structure there was no international view of that so how can we do that they are all really useful and valuable ideas which we will build into the documents as we go forward I think I've been quite significant able to do lunch time we're still good if you are able to stay after lunch we have we're going to do a similar exercise for this but focused on particular activities so they'll go into various rooms and go through a similar conversation as I said we're going to do this through all of the different states then we'll aggregate all of that into some form of document feed into our strategy as well but now lunch time hang on I need to tell people which rooms just before you all disappear for those people that want to stay on those satellite meetings I just want to tell you which rooms there in so you can go there the infrastructure group will remain in this room the skills tutorial room just across that direction room number 4 on this floor the platform's discussion will be a floor above us so if you take the equipment staircase up and look for room number 9 or 04009 and if you want to join the fair and trusted collections discussion that will be on the 5th floor so 2 floors up in room 6 and you'll have to take the lift together right thank you very much bye