 So, we acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands which UT now stands, pay respect to the elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge the important role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within this community. And now I'd like to hand over to Ian, who will start today's proceedings. Thank you. Welcome to you all. Thanks very much for coming along and spending a significant chunk of your day here. It's interesting doing these meetings, the kind of seating dynamics. You can see who the QUT people are. They can't be sitting down at the real board table. We've had Sydney and Victoria. We did threaten them with having to recap the day's events through Interpretive Dance or MIME if they sat up the back. So thanks for spreading yourselves out. Oh, I'll just go back to this. There we go. OK, so we're going to have a little poll during the day. And it's going to ask just a couple of questions about the summary points that we're asking people about. So this will flash up again a little bit later on. But if you can be ready just to type that in, there will be a point for questions towards the end of my talk. And there's a question and answer session after that. So today we're talking about the Australian Research Data Commons. As I said, I'm the acting director of the ARDC. A lot of my colleagues are here in the room today. A lot of familiar faces as well, which is really nice. Today is pretty, it's a big day and it's pretty packed. The first session will be me going through some background, some summary ideas about where we think the strategy for the organization could go, some of the outlines in terms of timeline, budget, how we propose to deal with the next three to six months. There will be an opportunity for question and discussion after that. But if you have any questions as we go, then please do pipe up. We'll have to shoot a microphone off to you, but just feel free to stop us at any point. After lunch, we're going to split into what we're calling satellite meetings. So meetings reflecting on our strategy, but in relation to particular big ticket kind of initiatives that we need some guidance on. And this exercise is really about us having gathered a lot of information so far and asking you what you think about the proposals we've got for going forwards. Some will be familiar to some of you, some the nuance might be different and some the actual approach might be quite different as well. So we'll go through a little bit of background, some partners. So nearly everything we do is through partnerships and we're taking a slightly different definition of partners. And I'll be talking just about a small section of those and highlighting why we're making a particular kind of fence around those. And then the strategy discussion later on about which we'd really like your feedback. OK, so there's another reminder for the poll. It's really quite weird looking sideways at the projector. I'll just look forwards down here. OK, so a little bit of background for people who don't know, Inchris, does everybody in the room know about Inchris? Does anybody in the room not know about Inchris? OK, so this will be quick as well. So Inchris, big originally capital project for collaborative research infrastructure. There are a lot of different projects and this is important, we'll come back to that in a little bit. A lot of institutions are involved. A lot of staff members are providing services into that and an awful lot of researchers benefit from that activity. Inchris, as you know, has gone from a capital stage. It had a few years of operating kind of life support mode and has now had a capital refunding for some, but not all of the projects. A little bit of history of ANS, Nectar and RDS. So again, if you're all familiar with Inchris, I'm sure you're all completely familiar with ANS, Nectar and RDS. These are the three of the e-research focused projects within Inchris but had quite different approaches to stakeholder engagement as well as quite different products and services that they provided. So RDS was probably the most technical of the projects and it was around national collections, so collections of data and around the infrastructure around those. And the engagement model for that was through partnerships with e-research organisations who we refer to as the node community and they were spread all around Australia. Nectar had the same node community involved with slight differences in the detail but generally the same communities. But Nectar was around the federated research cloud, which is really a very innovative idea at the time. And so that was a sector based compute and virtual machine cloud and the virtual labs that sit on top of that. So collaborative platforms, I guess, designed to democratise the ability for people to get access to high quality research workflows and instruments. And then on top of that, if you like, surrounding all of that was slightly more nebulous and a gender around the quality of data and what does that mean and how do we increase the general level of skills throughout the whole community, not just researchers, but also research administrators, institutions, as well as the providers of those services. How can we make sure that we're leveraging all of those investments to provide maximum benefit both to the researchers as well as to the people who are funding that research? Now, in 2017, the Department of Education asked us to align our activities. They said, look, you three parts of the same problem. Can you please make sure that those activities are as coordinated as possible? So we created we were still three separate organisations, but we had three business plans that were linked together by one overall umbrella business plan. In 2018, we've now integrated into one virtual organisation. So we still have three contracting partners. We now have one board and we have one management group across the whole set of activities. The intention is that in 2019, we will integrate into one actual legal entity as well. So that is a work in progress trying to define what that is, whether that's a single university lead agent or a joint venture or a company limited by something or rather is something that's being worked on at the moment and something about which there are many, many opinions. So interestingly, with 24 increase projects, there are practically 24 different ways of running an entity. So there's plenty of depth in terms of examining how you can run organisations. And there are ones that are run, you know, well with different models and less well with different models. So that's a bit of work that our board in particular is working quite hard on. What do we do? We have quite a broad range of services, which we, I guess, provide in inverted commas. So some of these are provided directly by ARDC. A lot of them are provided through our partnerships with organisations such as the nodes or institutions. Now, some of these in here are less obvious, but are actually very influential. So the government policy one, the ANS group in particular has been regularly called on to provide advice to the government around research data policy and has also provided a whole bunch of material which is fed upwards. So it's had quite an important role in, for example, the various guidelines and codes around research management. The international leadership and engagement. Australia is one of the founding partners of the Research Data Alliance. And ANS has always had a very strong role in that. So ANS has always had quite a strong international presence. The other ones you'll be familiar with, we've touched on briefly, the Publication Services refers to things like the Handle Services, the DOI Minting, IGSN and also Research Data Australia. So, you know, whether having one thing called RDA, which is Research Data Australia, and another thing called RDA called Research Data Alliance, both within the same organisation is a good idea, is a good question. Nonetheless, they're both very useful, both provide lots of value. And RDA, as in Research Data Australia, is a tool we're looking at how we can really exploit and grow that in terms of how we can push the agenda we have for fair data. And one of the beauties about RDA, it's a great portal itself, but one of the real advantages for it is it's very easily scraped by other directory services. So it's easily scraped by Google and provides a very easy entry point for that dissemination of data. Now, we've been reviewed many, many times, and one of our reviewers is in the room, Rob, down there. So we've had various reviews individually and collectively about how we can address the question of providing effectively research services to the community. Some were more technically focused, so how do you bring those pieces, the more mechanical pieces together? How can we improve the connection to industry? And some were a little bit more around data and where are the various organizations in their journey on data and how can we add value to that? The upshot is we've had many reviews, some of which have been made public, some of which have been kept within the department for their own consumption. Were there any consistent messages across those? Now, this is a very high-level description of the consistent messages across them. One was deliver an integrated data-intensive infrastructure. So what does that mean? It means we had a storage capability, a compute capability, a virtual lab capability, and a quality and curation of data capability. How do we bring all of those pieces together so they're more easily used by researchers and more easily explained to institutions? National coherence. So that first one is nice for all of the services and the pieces we do, but we're not the whole picture in terms of e-research, and certainly the world has changed a lot from the original Encriss investments. At that point, the Encriss capital was sort of the gorilla in the room for investment around these pieces. Now institutions, quite a few institutions, make local investments that dwarf our total investment. And so we have a slightly different role in there. We're at a much smaller stick, that's for sure. But also we're only part of that world view. So for example, AAF providing identity. We have the HPC capabilities of Pausie and NCI. We have Arnet, who provide not just the network services, but are moving up through this stack. And now I'm sure you all be aware of CloudStore and some of the other storage services that Arnet provide. And they have their own roadmap around e-research. So how do we, as really kind of independent of all of those pieces, what role can we play and bring all of those bits together to make them more easily accessible by researchers? And why are we doing any of this? So in bringing Anne's, Nectar and RDS together, the first step was to try to develop some shared language. So we could at least share a target from three sets of people who really had very different specific goals. What were the higher level goals that we shared? And we came up with these four transformations, which if you dealt with last year, these were part of our program structure. So deliver a world leading data advantage, accelerate innovation, improve collaboration for borderless research. And by that, we don't mean just international collaboration. We mean between states, between institutions and sometimes even within institutions and to facilitate translation of research into outputs. And that is one of the harder ones, the translation part. Now, in all of these, we are not going to be driving translation as ARDC, but what we can do is work with our partners to hopefully make an environment which makes it easier for researchers to create that translation. Our view is our role is to have impact on the people who have impact. So we're part of that research workflow. And why would we do all this? Well, really, because it's a competitive world in research as in anything else. And we want to make sure Australia's researchers are as competitive as they can be. I'm sure you will all know what fare is. If not, there's a remedial e-research class, which we can send you on. So findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. I only put that there because it relates to the next slide. Those transformations are pretty high-level, you know, fluffy unicorn goals that we would aim for. How do we break them into something that's a little bit more actionable? It's something that we can actually identify programs around and start to work on. So we've come up with these themes. So these are all the things we'd like your commentary on, both in the Q&A session and also in the following satellite meetings. Faire, as a concept, is generally used around data. And some might say generally overused around data. And so we're going to overextend it again, which makes Keith die a little bit on the inside. But we're going to use that model of fare to say, well, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Obviously, around fare, that fits within one of our transformation agendas. And fare research data is a positioning piece to make, to drive maximum value out of those data resources. But we can also use that paradigm to say, well, we want to make the Australian infrastructure as more fair as well. So making them findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable is one of the programs we'd like to look at. The research platforms, so that includes the virtual labs, as well as data access services. And then the last one, which is really crucially important, is it's great to have fantastic, high quality, findable data, excellent tools to use that data and WISBANG infrastructure that enables you to move through all those pieces. If we don't have a research community who are able to understand and exploit that, then we face a different set of challenges. So the skills program has been core to all of the programs, all of the projects, but has been addressed in slightly different ways. So we have a specific satellite breakout around skills, and it's been interesting as we go around the country. So I should say this is one of a series of meetings. We've had a meeting in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Hobart already, and we've got Adelaide and Perth later this week. And you'll see in the questions that come up, there's one about what, where do you think the emphasis should be around these themes? And we've had quite different results. So in fact, four meetings, I think we've had four different results across what they think the emphasis should be on. But skills we feel is really a core component of making sure that those pieces are used effectively. And how will we try and develop those programs? So in the Encriss roadmap, there was a loose collection of organizations, so the e-research organizations, ARDC, AAF, NCI, PAWSI and INET. They were the Digital Data and e-research platforms, or DDIP. And so this is a new grouping, which we've been working together with those organizations about how can we align and coordinate both knowledge sharing about what we're up to and what our strategies are, and what services and finding out how we can piggyback off each other and provide the best benefit without duplication, without stepping on each other's toes. Now e-research organizations, so the node community is still a very valued part of that system. What the role for the nodes going forward will be inside that system is one of the subjects for discussion today. Institutions have always been engaged more deeply by ANZ. We've not always had a very closely tied technical conversation with the institutions about what is your strategy around some of these underpinning resources and how can we align with that? And then of course commercial resources are a much bigger player now than they have been historically, and how do we loop those in in an appropriate way? And commercial solutions have pros and cons. Around this work, so particularly around the platforms and the infrastructure side, we've engaged two consultants to help us with that, so Max Wilkinson from New Zealand will be looking after the infrastructure side, and Nigel Ward, who many of you will be familiar with, looking particularly at virtual labs and platforms and what our strategy for those might be and what's the demand for the community, what's the shape of those things going forward? Now, we have quite a broad set of partners in there, but one of the really critical pieces is that we're part of the Encriss network. Encriss itself is an aggregator of communities, sometimes around technology, sometimes around domains. So if possible, when we do engage in activities, we will be looking at who the appropriate Encriss capability is to partner with on those. So for example, we're talking with bioplatforms Australia around some bioinformatics activity, AAF is a kind of quasi-Encriss thing, so we're talking with AAF around identity stuff, and the characterization capabilities would be a logical point when we talk about that type of activity as well. So working through the Encriss network will be our first, I guess, checkpoint whenever we look at activity. And then we'll be working with our DDIP colleagues as well to make sure that we're distributing that work or allocating that work in the most appropriate way, and that also we're not having two groups of us doing the same work at the same time. So just to quickly run through those groups again, there's the Pausy Supercomputing Center in Perth, NCI, who didn't give me a nice blurb slide, so that's just the front page of their website. Arnett, who gave me a very nice blurb site. And so you can see Arnett's agenda is shifting a little bit over time, and so we just need to make sure we understand that and that we can work closely with them. And the AAF, of course, this is possibly the first time AAF people have seen how I munched their slide, but that's fine. I guess there's a general message across. All right, so we've talked a little bit about where we're from, what's the big picture strategy we're aiming for? Have we broken that into some little, some more kind of digestible and actionable things? And some of the partners, the key partners will, excuse me, will be talking to deliver on those. And now let's talk a little bit about the approach we're aiming to use for that. And this approach is based very heavily on the Syro Impact Framework, which some of you may not be familiar with. This is a bit of work that we've done some workshopping with Syro around this, and we found this to be a really useful tool for reexamining the types of activities we do. And I guess if you were to boil it right down, you start at the far end. What's the point in the thing you're trying to do? What's the impact it's going to have? Now, for Syro, it's a triple bottom line impact, so societal, economic and environmental benefit. Where does it fit in there? For us, because we're a little earlier in that research workflow, we've started to redefine that a little bit in terms of our impact aim will be how are we going towards our four transformations, whether we're able to deliver on those. And we break those down into what are the outcomes that are needed? So what are the products that are needed to deliver that impact? And then you break it even further down into who would participate in that? What are the sorts of inputs you need? Who are your key dependencies? So it's working from the end backwards as you would do in project management but with perhaps an even further view of where you're going. And so our slightly adapted version of that impact framework looks a bit more like this. So the impact we're after is our transformations. The outcomes as we see them now would be things like the community development work, which interestingly, there's been a lot of appetite for ARDC really to act as an aggregator. So events like this bringing people together who don't necessarily always come together in the same room. Quality, both around data, so robust and reliable data, but also around tools and collaboration between organizations we can hopefully play an impartial broker role in there. And then the skills work. And the nature of the skills work is a really interesting one which we'd like to test with everyone. Activities would be the virtual labs, the clouds. So what do we want a sector-based cloud? If so, what does it look like? How does it work? Who owns the various bits of it? How is it going to endure over time and adapt? And metrics. So the original capabilities were not set up so much with a view of measuring success and how you would actually show that they've been successful. So this is going to be quite a key part of what we want to do going forwards is to make sure that we do have robust measures for success because it's actually quite hard to go to the government and say, we need more money because it's kind of good. You sort of know deep down it's good. And so that's a difficult conversation. And the hardware infrastructure. There, blank sheet of paper. So we're happy to entertain really all sorts of strategies around the hardware infrastructure part. That obviously makes it quite a challenging job for Max to distill that into a strategy within a couple of weeks, but we're confident he can pull it off. And the two clouds underneath, really around, we were successful in getting a capital allocation in the budget and we have an operational component as well. What we're trying to say there is for the stakeholders and partners who come to us, think less about whether you think this is a capital project or an operational project. We'll worry about how that fits into that funding model. We have, like I said, we can operationalise a capital piece and we can also capitalise a long-term operations piece. We haven't worked out how to capitalise a human yet, but we're working on that one. So worry less about the money side in terms of what bucket it comes out of and more around where it might fit in that life cycle and also a little bit, the next slide, a little bit, how the activity fits within the principles that we're going to use to look at these activities. So we have our transformation. So the long-term big picture destination, the theme, so the more actionable parts. We've got a little bit of talk about the impact about how we're looking at breaking those activities up how we're going to evaluate and measure the proposals that come to us. We have these principles. So innovation, transformation and acceleration are probably fairly self-explanatory. So acceleration really is around is there a nationally significant piece of work that we can help an organisation with that might shrink the timeline from five years to one year or something like that. The last two are really critical. National scope and scale and or scale. So we're a national collaborative research infrastructure projects. We're not an institutional research infrastructure project. However, we're interested in looking at institutional projects that we might be able to translate to a national audience. And similarly, there are some activities which may require national scale and how can we facilitate generating that scale by bringing the appropriate people together. And the last one is sustainability. Everyone has sustainability in their slide deck. For us, sustainability is how would this activity survive if we were to disappear? Increase is not always the most reliable funding source in the world. And while we have some certainty over the next period of time, we do want to understand what happens to the activities we're engaged in when either the government if the government's priorities change, then our priorities will change. How those activities might survive or transition out or how we can adapt and modify them going forward. So we've done some work on sustainability with the existing activities, but for new activities, sustainability will be a key consideration. So if you think that's the Venn diagram, obviously the sweet spot right in the middle and if you've got a project there, you can have a chat. Sustainability wraps around all of them. Okay, but we're interested in any conversations in any of those kind of spaces. But those are the kind of key themes that we'll be looking around how we can decide on activities. And also remember that if we can leverage an increased capability, then that would be our preference to do so. So I'll just whiz very quickly for the next little bit. I just put this reminder up because some of these pieces that we do now are easy to change and some are less easy to change. So I'll go through some of the ones that are less easy to change. The publication services are relied on by an awful lot of people for a lot of different things. Finding the appropriate way to deliver those is a piece of work we're going to go through for the next little period. I think we're pretty comfortable with how the activity will be involved in for some period of time. So whether we should deliver them or someone else should deliver them is really the question for us at the moment. The Nectar Cloud is used by an awful lot of people for an awful lot of different things. It's at really quite the pointy end in terms of infrastructure and how we provide that resource. So we need to come up with some good ideas around that and we are engaging with all of our existing partners and new partners to come up with ideas for how to do that. The virtual labs which are really regarded as being one of the successes of our part of Encriss, they have evolved into quite different beasties on their own and some are more engaged with their community, some are less. That virtual lab world has been a little bit closed off to new participants while partly due to the funding model we would like to discuss with people the potential where they would like to see virtual labs go, whether they'd like to see new virtual labs, different virtual labs, we could turn off virtual labs, whether we don't actually need virtual labs anymore, we need one big Lego lab where you can build your own lab. These are all good questions which Nigel again will be providing a concise summary for our board very shortly. And then the last part is our national collection. So we have considerable investment in the infrastructure that runs those collections. That infrastructure also is approaching the end of its life and we need to work out what to do with those collections, potentially how we can increase the value and visibility of those as well as the metrics around who's using them and how. But you can see there's about 40 something petabytes of data that's stored around Australia at the moment and how can we responsibly manage that in a way that still leaves us with lots of options going forwards. And then the skills service, I just got the time's up card. Skills, policy, engagement and consultancy. So the skills activity is a big piece. We're trying to work out the strategy for that. That'll be with Natasha this afternoon. The policy work is kind of the quiet achiever in the background that actually has quite a lot of influence both in communicating back from the research community to government and the agencies about, you know, potential challenges or opportunities and also back down, making sure we have guides and tools that make it easier to teach people how to do those pieces. Now, for all of these activities, our position at the moment is that it's the function that's important. So we want to maintain that function that we're quite open to different ways of delivering that function going forwards. We're going to whiz through. These are actually the interesting slides. How much money is there? We've got $110 million for operations over the next five years. We've got a $70 million capital allocation. The guideline around the capital allocation is spend it carefully. So there's two bits to that. A, spend it and B, be careful. So that's what this process is around. We want to avoid the very lumpy, bumpy investment that existed previously. We don't really want to just create another problem in four or five years where we have to go through all this all over again. The timeline. While this is going on, we're also having similar but more targeted consultations with our anchors colleagues. So the 24 of those meetings, which my colleagues Michelle and Andrew are leading, they'll be wrapping up in the next couple of weeks. We're having these state consultations. Like I say, this is the last week of those state consultations. And on or around December the 14th, we'll be releasing the draft strategy and capital plans. So there'll be the high level first cut summary of all the conversations we've had around the country and with all those organizations. And they'll be available for everyone to comment on. Following that, we have a few months to deliver the final capital and strategy plans to the department, at which point we hope to have a very clear description to potential stakeholders, both what those programs will be, but also how you would engage in those programs. So the moment we don't have the process documents around like is one going to be an open call? Is it going to be a targeted activity? Is it going to, you know, what's the form going to look like? We hope to have the shape of those things roughly by, hopefully in December, but if not then early in the new year. All right. We might go. So that's really the end of my banging on. We just have the quick poll and then we'll have a question and answer session. So trying to whack up the, oops. So you can point your mobile device or iPad or phone at the QR tag and hopefully that should pull up the address. You could also enter it manually if you prefer. Except I've got it over there. Has everybody got the URL? Okay. So who has not? Okay. It looks like give it a bit longer. Okay. So who has not yet got the poll up and would like to get it up? A few people still. Okay. Can we move it a little bit off the QR tag? Okay. So the address is etc.chslashx7mk. They're used to you. Yeah. So this is also open to the zoom participants. So we'll have a nice mix here of mainly institutions, few, yeah, quite a bit of research providers and increased facilities. So anybody need a little longer? Or has everybody been able to fill this in? Okay. Great. Then I'll move on to the next one. So the question is around which of the draft activity principles do you think is most important for us to consider in our strategic planning? So this is to guide us in our activities should be focused on innovation, transformation, acceleration, national scope, sustainability, sustainability. It's a bit like a horse race really seeing who's going to win. I think for the next consultation, we're going to have to organize bets around this and see which one gets there first. Okay. Interesting mix of perspectives, sustainability coming out top, but still quite a lot of interest in national scope and scale and transformation. Okay. Moving on to the next question. So which of the ARDC draft strategic themes do you think should be a top priority? So fair, fair or fair, which I don't mind obviously, but also a bit of skills and workforce development and they'll be fair in that too, possibly. And in case you're interested, we've done these polls in all our consultations and the ones that are still to come and we'll make those available so you can get a bit of an idea what the audiences were like in the different cities and what the perspectives were like in the different cities too. So they're interesting in this case, fair platforms coming out on top. That's it. That was the last of the poll questions. Thank you all very much. Great. Thanks, Keith. And it is interesting because now we've had five meetings and five different results when there are only four options. So that's going to make life more complicated for Nigel. Anyway, good. Thank you very much. So now we have opportunities for questions around what I've spoken about and I guess if you had any questions for each other around those poll results as well, that would be interesting. Some of the questions we sort of said, well, let's try and focus this a little bit. You can have questions on the general conversation now a little bit later on, but we'll have these questions around those satellites. But have a think about from an organizational perspective, we do a wide range of things with a wide range of participants and stakeholders. What could we or should we do more of or start doing? What could we or should we do less of or stop doing? And what could we do differently? So that if you're desperately trying to think of a question to ask, that's a framework there. So I guess feel free to ask any question at all. Aaron Raymond, University of Southern Queens. When the money was originally approved in the budget, it was because some of the capital infrastructure was urgently requiring upgrade. And that is still true for a lot of the capital infrastructure. But I see in your timeline, we're looking at investment flowing out maybe from March, April next year. Yeah. How do you resolve those two things? Just in terms of some organizations requiring capital to be upgraded prior to that point? Yeah. So the capital case was around the functionality around those pieces. So he said unless we had some means of providing that resource and generally through a capital investment, we would lose cloud functionality or we'd lose storage functionality. So we've not got off the kind of starting line as quickly as we would have liked to. We do hope to have some and maybe we'll do an interim step. So we've already done one interim step around pieces of the work we do to say we're a bit behind schedule. Here's some funding to keep you going. The collections and the cloud piece harder to do those interim pieces for. We're going as fast as we can. But like I said, the capital plan didn't say reinvest the funding in exactly the same way it was originally invested. It was make sure you don't lose that capability and that resource for Australian researchers. So this is why we're doing this actually quite quick intensive process to get as much information as we can. That'll come out in the draft capital plan and we hope to be able to have those investments starting fairly early in the new year. So unfortunately we can't go any faster than that to comply with the carefully bit. But we'll go as quickly as we can. My understanding of the capital funding was that that was granted on the basis that there is a market failure. That, for example, the research funding agencies are mandating that data is stored for a significant number of years. The research funding agencies are mandating that data is stored for a significant number of years and they're not providing funding for that. They're not providing funding for compute and other infrastructure. How does that fit with your concept of sustainability? Because I think everyone wants to move towards the sustainable model but given that market failure at the moment with the other research funding agencies, how do you see sustainability coming over the next four years? Yes. So we're working with the funding agencies around that question as well to say it's all very well to come up with a guideline that says you need to get this stuff for 20 years but without providing some solutions for that. That's an unrealistic kind of demand. So that's a piece that's evolving too. In terms of our idea of sustainability, our view is how will that thing survive if we disappear, if we go away. So for example if we were to invest in a state-based research organization to provide capability for some sector then how would that survive if in two years the government changes its mind and closes down in Chris or whatever it is? What's the pathway that can happen there? So it's not clear but I think one thing that is probably pretty clear is that relying on ARDC as a very long-range funding source has some risk associated with it for people who do that. We're not saying that that may not be something we can do but we're saying people need to think carefully about what happens if ARDC changes or increased changes or that funding supply changes. So it's not a very clear answer but that responsibility really is a shared responsibility. There's the institutional responsibility to look after part of that. The funding agencies I think also need to take some of the burden there and as much as possible we'll provide resourcing into that as well. Linda O'Brien, Griffith University. I'm just wondering how we're attempting to align our strategy with any national strategy around research investment generally and what's at play there federally because obviously there's quite a lot of interesting discussion at the moment about what sort of research they wish to invest in. I'm just wondering how that ties together. Yes so we'll try and follow the national of the science priorities in our investments but a lot of the activity we engage in is not necessarily focused towards a particular priority area. It's underpinning capability development. So for example what Phil was talking about making sure that research data or whatever the resources is is broadly available in a reliable and robust way benefits all of those priorities but there will be activities which are specific priority areas. They don't feature as strongly in our agenda but they do feature strongly in our colleagues within increases agenda. So we would expect them to lead that and for us to be able to support and partner with them in delivering on those. Do you think, oh it's ended. There were two aspects I didn't hear a lot about in your talk and wondered where you're going. One is international connectivity. How Australian infrastructure becomes interacts with the international infrastructure that's being established in parallel and the second was support for interdisciplinary cohesion amongst infrastructure platforms. There's a lot going on to support discipline platforms but I'm wondering about interdisciplinary. Yeah so that's I guess two parts of the conversation that we want to dig into more this afternoon. So the international leadership part firstly there's a role for our community in leading and directing that but secondly there's a very important role for us to facilitate bringing that best practice back here and we've in fact just engaged in quite a big exercise to look at the state of play internationally around a particular domain and so all of our activities when I said we've got a blank sheet of paper in terms of absolutely if the best solution for a domain is to subscribe to a a domain platform of which the exemplar is overseas then that's something we'll look at how we can facilitate that. If it's a stepped process of that is probably the leading platform but we'd like to keep the ties here how can we develop a test model for that here to see where we can modify that that's something we're open to as well so in fact we do have a program which is around improving the ability for domain I guess leaders to gather that best practice and so we have the ability for when we look at platforms to send people off to say go and find out actually what's the best way to do this in the world and bring it back and then we'll act on that and that's not necessarily sending ourselves off it's sending whoever is the right person off to ask those questions with the assumption that they will share it with as many people as they can so that's one bit around how do we follow international initiatives. The other part around interdisciplinary platforms again with our platform and virtual lab discussion we have quite the main focus virtual lab activities at the moment. The data side is to some extent a little more around making the data just generally more acceptable adaptable to more people and so again this is a conversation to have here there are domains who say well actually we just want to continue to refine our super duper world leading platform and there are other I mean Haas is a good example Haas as a domain is a pretty broad descriptor how do we create something that allows those multiple domains to operate on an environment in there and that's that is actually a very difficult question maybe you know trying to do Haas is too big a bite but that's one of the questions for here is to what extent is that cross domain you know breaking those walls down a little bit where is that something we should really be focusing on. Jane Hunter I'm here as a representative of the Academy of Sciences National Committee for Data in Science. My question is one of the key players and dominant players in this space in Australia is Data61 and you didn't mention them at all and you could see them both as a competitor and potentially a collaborator have you started discussions with them and how do you see Ardek working with Data61 in the future. Very good question so I guess if you think about data61 it's a very narrow sort of the size of a big uni and Data61 is a capability within that that provides a certain type of service to a certain type of people that we're very interested in talking to Data61 and particularly around how we can do work that complements what they're doing and how we can leverage the work that they're doing. There's a whole bunch of politics around making sure that that happens but there's an awful lot of people we didn't mention specifically but there's still key components of our partnership strategy really the ones I put up there were because they were highlighted in the roadmap as you guys need to come up with a coherent structure around yourselves but Data61 is again key to I think delivering a lot of this but how at the moment we're just kind of politely dancing around each other and hopefully we'll be able to build those links into something much tighter so they're not formally invited into the stuff we do just yet but we do have quite a lot of informal links over to Siro. Thanks Ian, Matt Belgard director of e-research here at QUT and also representing QCIF just to follow on from Rob's comment interdisciplinary it's a really important dimension and certainly we start thinking about one of those criteria you talk about in translation the impact the real world sort of impact we need to be cut across these areas so that sort of leads to that next dimension which is how do we how do you balance how does ARDC balance legacy versus innovation so we've got as you've highlighted a lot of legacy in terms of data and systems and laboratory VLs but that innovation how do we make that step and what's the process for retiring things perhaps that may be very good and very well up in terms of uptake but in terms of best practice or best of breed may not be the right strategy going forward so there's a bit of courage required to go through that journey and and I guess the last comment given the roles that I'm in I get to see a lot of activities off I guess microcosms of ARDC successes in cooperative research centers that are either starting or existing centers of excellence in various areas starting or existing so how do we how do we leverage from all those activities so that we can sort of not just go top down in terms of the directions that you're trying to develop as a strategy but also bottom up so how do we leverage from that and relate to that and then is you mentioned skills and you hope that I guess skills will be shared across from people going out to find out what best practices but what's the process for sharing I guess the more is interested in that the process thank you. Alright so the first one around really about are there things we're doing now which we should stop doing and how do you decide what those things are and how do you stop doing that what we are very conscious of is not creating shocks to the system and I think there are pieces which people would say definitely need to evolve into something slightly different or there are different directions they can go but it's a strategy of just turning those things off I think would not be helpful have historically been bits of national infrastructure that have suddenly been turned off and of course there's a lot of disruption and loss of faith and trust so what we would like to do is develop a roadmap for that March release which basically says look we've consulted with an awful lot of different people from a lot of different directions and the general message is that this thing we should do more of over time so we'll ramp up activity into that one this one we should probably do less of over time so we'll just start tapering away the activity in that this one perhaps needs to be scaled so that's our proposed approach for that so with all of those and I think we're quite comfortable with being bold around saying that was a market failure then it is not a market failure now or at least not how it was originally defined what's the market failure now and will we add value into that addressing something just because it's a market failure we need some good justification behind that and there are some good ones for a lot of us we do so we're quite open to discussion on any of the things we do and how we should do more or less of them but as I said it's really very interesting how different the opinions are on where the emphasis should be across the different states and so to some extent for us it's to say well this is what all of your colleagues have been saying as well and this is a kind of path that we think we can take through all of that that anyone will get everything they want hopefully everyone will get some of what they want but the role for the ARDC is still fluid and how we fit into those various pieces is a very good question so I think we'll produce this document middle of December and that'll be the time to say no that thing should be switched off or you've made a mistake this thing is actually critical to what we do and we need more of that the second question around how do we plan to make sure everybody can exploit the skills program is that kind of what you're saying Natasha can probably talk about that during the skills session but again that skills program has for us has been more around training the trainers and making sure that the resources are available and making sure that there's a reliable place to keep those materials there is additional scope for developing a community around the actual people who deliver skills and how we can make sure that that is done in the most effective way that there are some great models from overseas about how we can develop skills and workforce development program there are different sectors in there which we can focus on two research software engineers is one that's brought up at times the same way that data scientists and various other things were brought up over time and some of that is not necessarily around creating the skills it's around advocating for that community within institutions so they recognise the value themselves and that's part of our sustainability model is to say us valuing someone is fine so long as it fits within our kind of priorities and agendas but much more powerful for them to be valued in their institutions so good question and Natasha will be very interested to hear your comments and suggestions let's say there's a group the increased capability as well as the research RCC in UQ so one of the in the increased roadmap it was mentioned that the new ARDC or it was not called the ARDC at that time will be heavily influenced from the European Open Science Cloud so I was just wondering whether is that still true and then what will be the influence of the you know whatever the strategic direction the ARDC takes in the how the European Open Science has evolved yeah so yes we're keeping in close touch with what's happening in the European Open Science Cloud and that has that's a huge activity I guess if you look at some of the stuff we do as being a mini version of that across states rather than countries a lot of that is coordination and alignment and visibility of activity so yes we're still keeping it close to ARDC but we're not modelling ourselves necessarily on the EOSC so where there are available bits we can pull out there the bits will pull out and in fact where there are valuable bits we can contribute back we try to contribute those back Thanks from the Australian bioinformatics commons pathfinder project yes I just had a question about fair infrastructure and I guess you could imagine that as a sort of you know researchers having access to a hybrid sort of infrastructure that may include you know aspects like Nectar Cloud and other national you know nationally provide resources like NCTI Pausie and have the network from Arnett I was just wondering how strategically important or embedded as a concept of fairness to those other providers in sort of coming on board in providing this kind of hybrid infrastructure yeah okay good question and very variable right so you know some communities bake fair into everything they do and if your data is not open you don't get to use their capability whereas others much less so I think that's one of the beauties of fair is that fair is a contextual description so fair within bioinformatics you can still be gold standard fair within bioinformatics but it might be a very different actual thing to fair within marine or astronomy so I think fair as a concept is a work in progress about demonstrating the value of fair so for us as a functional piece about making sure you can find an access and use those pieces effectively because they're investments we make and we want as many people as possible to benefit from that for a researcher making their data fair is not there's not an easy sell there's not much in it for them you don't get a promotion for it you don't get a grant for it so we're working with the funding bodies around that saying well if you want long life and reusability for your data then you need to come up with some reward mechanism for that as well so fair is a priority for us but it's contextualized by the partners we work with so the bioinformatics commons for us is not primarily a fair exercise it's actually a couple of pieces what's a really good thing for refining an already quite sophisticated community but also what's the state of play internationally around some of those underpinning research infrastructures and what can we learn from that for our research infrastructure conversation and that's some of that's a bit less fairy and a bit more actually hard work we need to come up with solutions for the storage the compute cloud the platforms so a question from one of the zoom participants Steve McEchen are there any plans to consider how better to support sensitive data that is data which needs to be accessible but can't be open yes and sensitive data is the one thing that's been brought up consistently in every meeting we've had so it's a hot topic and sensitive data means different things again for different people so if it's medical data is one thing survey data is another thing we would like to be led by the communities who are worrying specifically about sensitive data so institutions have a view around sensitive data which is not necessarily the same as medical practitioners view around sensitive data and we're looking at activities with with various partners there to say well perhaps what are some steps we can go towards defining sensitive data where we can add value and where we can add value in a way that again that community has enough momentum behind it that it can survive without us so yes we're doing a lot around sensitive data it's not not something we're pushing in particular but it's something that's being brought to us a lot and we would like to see where we can add value to that time's up alright thank you very much I'll just whiz off to the three questions again and hand over to my colleague Michelle Barker who will lead us through this discussion thank you Thanks Ian and I'm the Deputy Executive Director of the ARDC we are now going to spend half an hour with each of you having a small group discussion so that we can really maximise hearing from you on your ideas and benefiting from your expertise and each group will focus on answering all of these three questions what should we do more of or start doing what should the ARDC do less of or stop doing and what should the ARDC do differently there'll be a staff member from the ARDC joining each group as note taker and when we come back together they'll report back on what each groups come up with which will take us through to the break at 12 to split into the groups we're going to use the poll demographics to help identify where there might be common areas of interest so I'm going to suggest we have one group around increased capabilities one group around e-research service providers and the other three groups focused around institutions now you don't have to go to a particular group even if you are an e-research provider you can choose to go to an institution focus grouping they might end up much more eclectic but we'll offer that opportunity if people want to congregate with like-minded people to get their different viewpoints on how to answer those questions and Keith do we have a zoom group yes so physically we might in that back corner put the e-research service providers in the other corner put the increased capabilities and then have three loosely institutionally centric groups here around the middle board table and back here on this side so if you'd like to move to wherever feels comfortable and we'll give you a staff members note taker hello all so that was the end of the plenary bit for now and in the plenary room they'll now be doing the breakout discussions and what we can hear is do a similar breakout discussions around those three questions and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts please throw them into the mix and at the end I'll then be able to contribute them back in as each of the groups or feedback into the plenary so I'll unmute you and just throw your thoughts into the mix about things that ARDC should do more of new stop doing or do differently so first of all I'll unmute you and then I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts here we go one moment you are now unmuted I've got a comment here then if that's a suggestion or rather a question following up on Steve's question is there consideration to consider the data marketplace model or there can be a continuum of data openness and value exchange between producers and consumers of data I can hear you now, sorry Okay, so Jason Bell here from City University one of the comments I guess I wouldn't provide back or to keep going was initially when a lot of the NECDA and RDSI and all that sort of stuff was funded it funded infrastructure but no service wrappers or anything else like that that made the use of that infrastructure easy and one of the things that I've seen more lately and particularly from an adhesive perspective is that they're adding additional wrappers making infrastructure more accessible and easier to use so that researchers from the long tail of them and groups who didn't have built-in IT support could actually leverage some of those infrastructure services and so my opinion would be to continue with that and ensure that whatever funding goes into storage, computing and all of those sort of things that service wrappers be applied so they can make it more easy to use and moving forward it would be great where there was a research infrastructure that like a lot of these commercial entities that to one stop install for a website or a I can't think of the names at the moment but where they can actually have no IT schools and leverage some of the services and things out there that would make it more easy to use okay thanks Jason anybody any thoughts on that? or have different ideas on that? okay Stephen Keckerman here this is sort of interesting to reflect on that long tail discussion that question of how to enable those with who might have the lower level of IT skills I don't think we can assume none that's there probably ought to be at least some level of expectation on the user side that said making the requirement lower than it is now I think is certainly that ought to be a goal for any of the infrastructure but particularly those servicing the long tail is say the set of requirements that are there to initially make use of the infrastructure that currently exists mitigate against certain disciplines or communities I think so I think there's a happy medium there that probably pushes towards the lower skill requirements rather than the higher but yet trying to push in that direction I think would be commendable it also makes it more scalable you know I think this is the other question that some of the infrastructures that do exist are actually relatively small in terms of the audience that they can support if you're pushing into some of the broader disciplinary domains and passes my thing of course but you have to be operating a different level of scale than some of the systems are currently thinking about. Okay, yeah. So my thoughts on that here on here is that I think one of the rules of ARDC is to lower the barriers for the research in Australia whether it's at the peak or whether it's at the tail end and the long tail so if everybody's came up I think there's been a bit of a mix in the past of how that's happened. Anybody else any thoughts on this topic? It's Ferrell here from Tern I find ARDC has a bit of a schism in is it there to serve increased groups or is it there to be a national infrastructure in its own rights and if it is a national research infrastructure what purpose does it feel that it's not filling already and I just wonder whether there's a component of both possible within its remit I think the others who've spoken have suggested that the other national research infrastructure capabilities struggle to cover off on the data side of it because they are experts in particular domains but not necessarily in the data domain so I think there needs to be value add from within the increased program of a group that acts as wise council coordinator etc of how we proceed with data and then there's obviously an innovative role that ARDC holds as national research infrastructure in its own right to make as much not just the other increased capabilities but research data groups in Australia that much more capable to barely unmute can you hear me, where did you get up to innovative role research data groups that's where you cut out the hopeless remembering what I just said so a service to increased groups because I think we need the leadership and also a service to as research infrastructure in its own right but I think that there's need for both to be there and not to be lost so I think your argument there was to make sure that both is involved in the way ARDC operates and the aims we have so you mentioned the value add providing a wise council to increased facilities but also having a sort of innovative role towards national research infrastructure and data infrastructure more broadly sounds sounds like a good argument okay great thanks Birol I'd like to add a few thoughts in here I was pleased with what Ian said at the beginning how of the reason why Nectar, RDS and ANS came together one reason was to have a common language on that I think that's needed across the sector as well a common language that we can all speak to so I think it's good to use ARDC and say how do you shape the environment as a cross cutting thing that we can have a common language we can talk about the not just the technologies but also the interoperabilities the people and the organizations how do we come together and what's a common language we can use adding to that in my comment I was asking the question I had what's the thoughts on marketplace a data marketplace that I think seems like one of the concepts that is the next evolution from where we have been around fair data, open data how do we build that continuum of not just making data open because there is a range of steps in between private data and open data which all make sense and have different value exchange between the data provider or data creator and the consumer and different dynamics in there and I think we need that level of maturity going forwards if we're going to continue to lead the way in these things and I think ARDC plays a critical role in being able to influence that catalyse those kind of things at least try to catalyse those conversations and dialogues across the country yeah so your point is that ARDC could play a role in influencing catalyzing dialogue around the data marketplace but also just more generally around finding a common language across the sector around technology but also interoperability in people and organizations that's sort of a summary. Less about the technology but about how the models and patterns that are there for bringing the data extracting the value out of that in organizations coming together to do things there's social and the technical dynamics of things. Thanks. Hi Sean Warpole look I'm representing Brisbane Diamond Tina I'm sort of new to this of actually learning a lot from listening rather than anything else today what I'd like to say I think is the most important part is the interoperability of data and sharing across sources which need to be totally independent of technology and as I come from the health sector our biggest problem relates to the privacy issues which still drive problems and we need something nationally which allows us to get by this because it leaves us with lots of silos which do not interconnect well and therefore even if you take something like AHAW which links data that really doesn't have individual patient data really well organized such that it counts events rather than a longitudinal history of people so that you get some biases in the data so we need to work out how the interoperability sharing while maintaining privacy to whatever standard that we're made to follow comes to comes to fruition. So Steve how does that intrigued that Steve does that resonate and connect with your comment around sensitive data and looking at data? Yeah there are there are a number of dimensions to the sensitivity that I say this is why I'd like that to be a fairly broad discussion I work with medical researchers I work with sociologists I work with environmental scientists we all have different elements of sensitivity but there are some common threads that actually run through them as well and some other sorts of questions that were just being raised are not dissimilar to things you might see in some of the longitudinal studies we deal with and increasingly those studies are bringing together biometric genomic social survey you know the integration of those things as was pointed out connecting those things up is just more and more the more important research questions I think are being addressed in our space by doing those sorts of interoperability addressing those interoperability questions so yeah that's part of that story and I think to talk about them in disciplinary terms which can be the case mass sort of separates the conversation that does need to cross over some of these domains as well so I'd be encouraging that John Lutanzia here I'm chair of the science advisory committee for astronomy Australia limited and we're having a meeting about computing infrastructure in a week or so I don't want to be contrary but I'm a little bit I'm really glad I don't have to do this because I think it's almost impossible to do what you're trying to do and more strength to you and we should all try to help I mean I don't know how uniform we really want things to be I understand exactly all of the privacy concerns of the medical side of the view set up some system that's got that in astronomy subject to it that's just an enormous burden on the astronomy data because we don't need that and you know what we need may well be different to what other people need and so I'm not quite sure how uniform you can make it without then having an extra burden on the people providing the the infrastructure so I think we should make it as uniform as possible but not overdo it my university keeps coming up with templates for everybody to use for their PowerPoint presentations and they're just not appropriate for everybody I mean by that by that logic the astronomers will be buying test tubes just like the chemists there has to be some differences somewhere I wouldn't disagree with that I think the point though is where there are it's trying to identify those spaces where there are potentially aggregate sort of an economic argument where you can aggregate some of these capabilities together that's where I think you'd want to be seeing you know let's try and share where those things exist but not to try and say no these things apply to everyone in the same way that sort of my statement was you know not everything can be open the whole open data movement is great and I'm strongly in favour of it but not if it raises issues in terms of addressing compromising some other considerations in some of the fields that I work in so it is the same argument I think but yes know what your data is and know what the communities you're trying to support and trying to aggregate it where that makes sense but not force it where it doesn't which is all way too hard for me which is why I'm glad I don't have to do it I'd agree with what I do it's about looking at the set of patterns that emerge I think and re-use some of those patterns and not keep reinventing it again but not saying there's one pattern that everybody must do so up till now we've sort of been talking about the way things that ARDC focus on focus on mainly question also there was a question about what should we stop doing so I'd be very intrigued to your thoughts around what should ARDC stop doing or maybe do things you think are not working or where we should take it approach or things that you think well that's actually not something that ARDC could effort all money into into the future can you give me okay because my mic is having trouble at the moment you're coming in an hour to bit but you're okay okay so I guess one of the challenges that ARDC and its prior entities have had to date is the uptake and trust of their services around the research communities in Australia and I guess one of the reasons why uptake is a factor is that the research community don't necessarily want to invest in learning new infrastructure or using national infrastructure if it's not if it doesn't have a long lifespan ahead ahead so I guess one of the things that I'd be keen for ARDC to do differently is to make sure that the focus ARDC has is on innovative and translational transformational aspects and that if anything becomes BAU sort of something that's used by researchers on a day-to-day basis that that gets shifted off onto a sustainable provider as soon as possible whether that's a single provider or multiple providers it doesn't matter but I guess it's that those providers have the trust of the research communities and they understand that those services are not at the whim of future government investments and that they're stable so that's one thing I'd be keen to for ARDC to move to in the future I'm just wondering if those stable environments exist for many domains so I guess ARDC has got a as Beryl would say there's a domain focus but then there should also be a national focus so there are national entities out there that have services geared towards the research communities that are sustainable I guess it's whether or not those should be expanded upon to cater more strongly for domains if the main support is what's needed or maybe it's possible that this could be looked at sort of nationally without domain focus but I think it probably needs both Also just to add to that one point is that I agree completely with Frankie in the sense that researchers have been using research infrastructure before because it's here one day and gone the next and depending on funding cycles and things like that and part of my role is to I guess help to increase uptake and get people using these services but when the common message out there is that it may not be there forever people go and look at other alternatives to do that's something that they know is going to be around for a long time and whilst I agree that research funding is finite and it can never be guaranteed I think if we set up some models or some capabilities and such that if a service is very popular and used a lot then can it be rolled out or moved or changed in a way that it then becomes a sustainable service and will continue running for a long time because nothing's worse for researchers in the sense that they use a service or put stuff on an infrastructure that in one or two years time they've got to go and load a completely new system because that's been decommissioned or no longer available and so whilst there will always be people at the bleeding edge and want to use their latest grace there are people who are prevented from doing that because they're just not sure whether it will be around and going back past history there have been services that have been completely cut and nothing to replace them and so that's something that keeps researchers and colleagues aware of Any other questions or thoughts around that sustainability challenge of infrastructure and services and offerings being provided through AIDC how that carries forward? I think there's, sorry Keith just a quick comment on that I think that ties into that long tail discussion we had before which is a little bit I mean if we actually look and maybe I'm being a bit domain specific here actually but certainly within the social sciences they're basically a delivery of commercial products I mean we rely on commercial products fairly heavily for the services that we're using and I'm thinking here specifically on software but there is a business capability there and we haven't really had to develop domain specific there's some algorithms within there that have been relevant but for the most part so the core functionality sits on every desktop in every lab in every university so there is the capacity to move in that direction for certain domains I think but again it sort of comes back to that scalability question that's there we don't want to be trying to develop bespoke solutions if you're trying to scale them up to the thousands or tens of thousands of users say I'm not quite sure how those two things come together but I don't think it's not coincidental so being able to leverage the resources the systems and resources that are already there probably there's probably something underlying that but how you support that what Frank is talking about there is how are you going to scale the delivery of those facilities those small scale facilities across very large numbers of users which is a different sort of dynamic so if I I'm trying to unpack a little bit talking about sustainability challenges and you're talking about don't develop small scale solutions that actually will not be sustainable and scalable to a larger group of users down the track it's a little bit I'm just thinking here is why have those solutions continue to work fairly well at least on the software side within our disciplines it's probably because they they have a broad base of users and there's a relatively low number of them but they've also managed to produce you know or there's been commercial options and non-commercial options as well but they have a broad base so that you have enough users who can you know allay to address this question of sustainability by spreading the the long term support for those systems okay any other I was just going to add a little bit more on that is I guess where I'm coming from is not so much about a piece of software stack or something to that but more in the infrastructure the resources available I'll go back to it's something like the ARCS data fabric in which it had quite a number of people using it and I was promoting it internally and it disappeared and there was no solution available that allowed people to store their data for a couple of years afterwards and if you have a look at the ARNET cloud store and big bold letters they say they're sustainable and that they plan to provide this solution indefinite now that gives a lot more reassurance then something like here is some virtual machines or here is some storage and that may or may not be around in 5 years time when the next foaming cycle comes around and that provides some concern because people may get in and develop some cloud or cloud resources via an actor which is based on open stack and that sort of stuff and they have it working well it disappears and it may not be simple for them to convert that to then run on an Amazon or whatever it might be and so if they build an Amazon they know that that's going to be around for quite some time and more than just funding cycles and so I guess that's what I was more talking about was the infrastructure and the services that apply on top rather than our Pacific stack per se Any other thoughts? A lot of that discussion around what things we should stop doing or do differently surrounding the sustainability challenge of services and making sure that they move on to business as usual are there any other things any other thoughts around things we should stop doing pieces of work that perhaps are not useful or considerations in our decisions about what we should not do and what we should do I don't mean anything Sorry, I'm going to go around Feral? I just wanted to say one thing I've stopped doing is being risk averse I think there's a very long period since the investment was announced and still no certainty about where ARDC is going and what the rest of us should do and so it's putting on hold a lot of other people's work so I think that decisions need to be made fairly urgently to move on Thanks Kieran, I think we're actually about to go back to Kieran do you want to add a last thing into the No, no, I think it's good Yeah So thank you all for your thoughts what we now go back into the plenary session and there we'll read out for the different groups what were the sort of the main findings I think two things that I'll try and sort of summarize two main points on what we should stop doing or do differently is around stop being risk averse and the question around sustainability and making sure that infrastructure and services have a longer term home a reliable trusted home which could be outside the ARDC if it's more business as usual there was also a range of different perspectives what we should be doing and I'm taking into account looking at infrastructures making them easy to use having service wrappers on top of them dropping requirements looking at the supporting both national research infrastructure and increased facilities and developing a common language across the sector and looking at privacy privacy data it's Kieran's point but and when we're talking about the common language it should not be one language for all but rather take into account differences between disciplines I think that was it wasn't one language for all it wasn't one pattern for all not one pattern for all that's a nice one there's common problems but different solution patterns is how I would say okay I hope that sort of captures the main points anything else I've not captured there I'll try and elaborate a little bit more when I report back okay in that case I'll go back and then you should be able to hear the sound from the main media all of the bioplatforms dvl being repurposed for has use but also a note that we needed a top-down approach as well which looks at who are our end users because that can give us a broader picture of large scale change not just repurposing we can repurpose something that's already there but is that actually a good use or do we need to develop something else that promotes a different way of working so we wanted also clarity around services and how they can be used so perhaps a service catalog or a big map of what we have now we wanted to get a research folk on the ground up to speed on platforms promotion across institutions and also maybe lists of general terms so everyone knows they're talking about the same things which is particularly difficult across disciplines we had an idea to set aside some funding for documentation that can make things more accessible or promoted so this thing has happened this is what's happened at our institution here's some information about it happening and that would hopefully lead to more accessibility and being into disciplinary aid and last on that we had metrics how do we know we're doing this properly and we need to have particularly interdisciplinary discussion about what these agreed standards are so moving on to point 2 what should we do less of or stop doing prior to any other discussion we said well we don't know yet because we need a mapping activity so that we can know what's there and that map should all be there regarding some specific points with virtual labs we need to remove unnecessary duplication across those platforms and this also fits into a wider discussion about standardisation so standardisation will help us know what we have too much of or not enough of or how things could work better together and infrastructure should be fit for its purpose and if it's not we need to look at making changes there should also have more than one person responsible for dealing with that feedback and giving advice that institutions want to be really involved with that and again more gap analysis to reveal the need for less or more of on the third point what should we do differently there was a concern that ARDC is in transition and though the timeline is aggressive there's been a perception it's not fast enough so it would be great if there was more action things being done quickly so that we know where we're going on that note taking staff from permanent or semi-temporary contracts has been really problematic for institutions it creates holes that are hard to fill and it would be nice if there's more certainty there so perhaps better contracts or methods of staffing and for the people themselves we need to think about is this good for the career progression and some clarity about the terms of contracts for people doing ARDC work disagreements help institutions perhaps not disagreements help ARDC perhaps not perhaps they do we need some analysis there what we know is that cherry picking of staff is not working very well for institutions and they'd like to see some metrics about it so that they can engage on that they'd like to know is there more of a plan and can we make contracts in the meantime faster so that we have some clarity following from that it would be nice if there were more clear communication methods set up with ARDC so mechanisms about sharing what we're doing so we've got institutions who've got work being done in CICs for example and they don't want to duplicate the work there with ARDC planning and activities so there needs to be a bottom up as well as a top down approach Nigel Ward acting as special advisor to ARDC if you've got to tell everyone that I'm special in but I like to repeat it every time so our group was I think predominantly meant to be about both providers but we had general group there really what should ARDC do more of there was a comment about giving fairer access to language data as part of a broader humanities movement and there's a bit of a discussion later on about in the humanities maybe focusing on data provision rather than analytics could be the focus a suggestion to focus on the A in ARDC so focus on more national coordination Australian coordination common infrastructure common approaches suggestion to bring communities together from end to end from collection of data through aggregation analysis creation of knowledge and translation actually try and do that end to end with particular communities and even across disciplines a bit of a discussion about supporting non-technical researchers and this was not just training this was about providing them access to CIS admins of ops that sort of thing and also developing that capability within research communities interoperable infrastructure make sure all the bits work together in the commons as well as more reliable infrastructure particularly if we're starting to talk about translation to commercial we actually need more reliable infrastructure part of that translation discussion we talked about engaging more with industry and government it was noted that there aren't any industry or government people here today that's maybe an oversight and how do we align with commercial interests and support their sensitivity requirements and what's the relationship between that and fair suggestion that ARDC could start learning the lessons of the past and mandating design principles best practices in its platform and infrastructure rollout so for example mandating single sign on through AF or common data protocols common data common provenance tracking and a suggestion that ARDC could engage more deeply in that sense with projects and bring its lessons previous lessons learned to bear on new projects information needs to flow both ways right what should ARDC do less of there was a particular virtual lab in linguistics that was mentioned that maybe should be shut down because it feeling of some people in that group was that it wasn't delivering and move away from analytics linguistics more to just data provision less collection less focus on collection med level metadata in RDA more focus on item level metadata that's what researchers want they don't want to know about the collection they actually want the data and suggestion that was frustrating or useless to have data that's described but not available some this is just things that ARDC has done in the past invested in the past and now just part of the culture so perhaps we don't need to reinvest in those so fair the feeling was that fair is quite widely known across the sector now maybe we can wind that investment down another suggestion was that we should transfer leadership over time from ARDC to the partners as a way of sustaining effort which leads on to what should do differently let's say continuity was important year on year funding means we lose staff we heard Siobhan talk a bit about the staffing issues earlier acknowledges it's about sustainability of services not projects let's say improve and measure quality of services to help sustain them there was a bit of a discussion about the mismatch between some of the principles that Ian mentioned earlier mismatch between sustainability and and fair principles you know fair is about is opening it up but why would an institution invest in fair data and fair limits commercial engagement open the door to a platform renewal maybe do an open call for platforms again because that lets us bring in your investment partners and longer term partnerships through state governments mediate relationships between institutions and other providers and I think I'll leave it there thanks Nigel we covered some of those points so just briefly we didn't get to the questions in that order so I'll just summarise the things that we did go through so we thought the storage infrastructure was great but there's enough integration around joining up separate services that have been created platform and tools are well provided in some areas but other areas are lacking or haven't been neglected initially specifically the house area they are people within the grid like the idea of what's going on in UTS where they've got a diagram of all of the services and how they all join up and interact together and some people would like to see more of that sort of infrastructure building how do researchers find the services so this is a bit of a problem because some of the people that are providing these services within institutions don't feel confident enough to engage in detailed discussion or promotion of the services that are provided and they would probably like to have their school set lifted in that area or at least partner with ARDC to have experts available with the storage, better visualisation and analysis tools would be great it's not integrated at the moment in many areas and the point was made well maybe it's up to institutions to develop a lot of these services with support of ARDC as opposed to expecting ARDC to provide them all themselves and then we talked about sensitive data and how much of a special case that is and how much support that could be provided there would be useful Thank you very much this is the first for two things firstly I followed the questions in this particular breakout and secondly I wrote them on my computer for the first time so please bear with me we had a very enthusiastic group with a slant toward institutions and e-research capabilities either in Chris or otherwise and what came out about wanting to do more of or to start doing we saw great value in increasing the international reputation and presence of Australia Australian research and ARDC had a clear role in doing that continuing what ARDC started but also extending that into other areas where the influence was apparent Australia has an opportunity to be a bridge between the major centres and e-research around the globe and we should make use of that examples of international interaction occurred with training resources or other standards and interoperability one thing that was raised as a risk was that there is geopolitical sensitivities that need to be taken into account but that's something that ARDC can take on rather than individual organisations there was a very big notion to add value to existing capabilities and existing services particularly around negotiated access for mutual benefit we had examples of walled gardens in public assets and brokering roles that allowed disciplines to work with each other rather than against them and this extended into brokering for services and expertise as well what we should do less of or stop doing there was almost consensus that bespoke infrastructure is not the future whereas bespoke services were the future so that's good news for me bad news for Nigel cloud is considered generally an embedded tech now it's not novel anymore and the idea as a platform of a service has gained a lot of traction with our group we should stop supporting discipline focused services and instead support services that could be used by disciplines what we should do differently it might sound like a tautology but we should plan for the future rather than the past and we should focus on how we join up national capabilities and infrastructures to support the coherence activity that's one of the things that's already been flagged quite a lot in our strategy so that's great and then we finished up talking about having a data focus on national persistence of data and how that might look and how that might work and it's something that a national organization needed to do rather than any one individual organization had a clear role to facilitate that rather than actually take responsibility for it I realized that I've probably missed some people's conversations was there anything that I'd missed that people wanted to point out they are a long way away so it makes it a bit hard for them to put out their hands so that's from the zoom group it was a wonderful very lively conversation with reps from all sorts of different areas increased research infrastructure institutions research organizations MRIs so it was a lovely mix number of points came up first of all things we should do things we should focus on well the view was the aim of the ARODC is to lower the barriers for researchers to be able to conduct their research make sure that addresses both the peak research but also long tail research the question came up for whom where should the ARODC put its focus should it be on increased facilities or on research the broader research data infrastructure community out there in Australia and the idea was that it should be both and should have a good mix across those work we should do should not just focus barely on bare bones infrastructure but provide infrastructure with service wrappers and support across that so that infrastructure can be used by a broader community with also lower IT skills so that makes it also accessible to longer tail research there was a suggestion that ARODC should influence and catalyze the development of common language around infrastructure technology bring people and organizations together and sharing patterns in that space one of the examples of a pattern in that space was the data marketplace in which data can be shared with appropriate routes making sure that people actually get recognition or value back for the data that they have created when we discuss that and discuss those patterns there was also agreement that those patterns are not generic across all disciplines but you need various patterns for various disciplines with different questions point was made about interoperability and sharing of sensitive data especially in the medical and health space addressing privacy issues in that space looking at integration of a range of data types that enables the answering of very valuable research questions in that space and it is a complicated space and it is very valuable if ARODC could play a role in putting that together so that data can be brought together at the national level the question about doing stopping things or doing things differently the main point there in the discussion was don't set up infrastructure or solutions that get turned off it would be great to have infrastructure solutions that researchers can trust and can build on and can keep on using so the idea there was to focus that the ARODC should focus on innovative and transformative activities and investments and then once services become more established transfer those to sustainable trusted providers and they can take it up as business as usual about things that ARODC should stop or do differently please stop being risk averse don't slow down make decisions and move on so that everybody can sort of work together and benefit from the ARODC so thanks thanks Keith anyone else no good alright thank you to all of you for your inputs we take all of the data from each of these sessions across the seven consults we do across Australia we combine them to then utilise in our planning drafting the strategic plan and we'll also put the notes of these sessions available online in due course so that people can review what other sessions have come up with we're about to break for lunch from 12 till 12.45 when we come back at 12.45 it's not all to this room so you have a choice of four satellite sessions on the agenda there's four detailed primarily on the back of the agenda agendas are available down the back if you haven't seen them or they should be online there's the skilled workforce session which will be led by Natasha Simons down the front here and that'll be in room it's written on the agenda do you want to tell us Andy where some of the rooms are yep so the skills is in the library and the large building out towards the left here I think most people know the library here it's on the top floor in v714 the other two rooms for infrastructure it's p419 and FAIR is which is this room and then FAIR which is room 504 so if you go out of this room up the stairs you'll see directly in front of you two rooms there are four on 505 504 will be FAIR and 505 will be platforms thanks Andy and Andy is our star coordinator of all the details of today which we very much appreciate so you can choose which session you come back to after lunch those sessions meet from 12.45 to 2.30 then we all come back for a bit of morning tea and afternoon tea and from 2.45 to 3 back from those four sessions up for finally summing up so thank you for your contributions this morning and I look forward to more this afternoon