 So, we are really excited and delighted that Hilary came out to Australia and did a meet and greet around Australia, providing first-hand experience and background on what the research data alliance is. And in that context, she provided a number of sessions in a number of the capital cities here in Australia, and we thought we'd also organise this virtual session for those that were not able to attend the actual physical meet and greets. To start off, welcome Hilary, Hilary Hanoho. She's the Secretary General of the Research Data Alliance. She has been that since 2018, and her responsibilities include leadership of RDA membership, effective management of the research data alliance organisation and its legal entity, the Research Data Alliance Foundation, there we are, and engaging with a whole range of stakeholders and organisations that play a role in the research data alliance. So she's had a strong background working in a whole range of communication roles and engagement roles around research data and research data alliance in the past, also coordinating research data Europe for a while. So she's really happy to have her in this role and happy that she was able to come out to Australia and provide her thoughts in a range of meetings around the country. From the ARDC perspective, we care an awful lot about the Research Data Alliance. We are also an organisational member of the Research Data Alliance, and we see it as a really key international initiative, enabling researchers and innovators to share data across technologies and disciplines, and that's why we're also delighted that the Research Data Alliance plenary next year, early next year in March, will actually be taking place in Australia. So from that reason, we're extremely delighted that Hilary was able to come out here. So at this point, I'd like to hand over to Hilary. Okay. Thank you very much, Keith. Thank you to all of you for attending. Okay. So thank you again for joining. I will try to give you insights into the Research Data Alliance, as I like to say, a data window to the world. As Keith said, I have been in this role of Secretary General since the February 2018, and I represent basically, well, you, if you're a community member, and if not, hopefully you will become one. So I represent the community of the Research Data Alliance, and I'll try and give you some insights into who they are and what it actually does. So I start usually by saying, well, what's in a word? Because there are many words that we all hear, you know, open science, Research Data Management, Research Data Services, the Science Cloud, which is a very popular one in Europe, data commons, of course, here in Australia, e-research, which I learned here, and then FAIR. So all of these words actually are words that you can associate to the Research Data Alliance, and the words that you see in the picture are actually all the names of the working and interest groups that the Research Data Alliance has all put into a word cloud, and what I think is really interesting there is that the word interoperability research and data come out quite strongly, and also, of course, management and things like that, but so the Research Data Alliance is about all of those different words and many, many more. It's something for everybody. It's something for anybody grappling with the Research Data Management challenges and open science policies and things like that. So just to stay, it's important to explain the Research Data Alliance and how it started. So in 2012, Australia, Europe and the US funded programs in each of their countries, regions, and came together, though, with a common vision that they needed to set up an initiative, a very ambitious initiative that ensures that researchers and innovators openly share data across technologies, across disciplines and across countries to address the ground challenges of society, so very high level vision, but of course, the important words there are across technologies, across disciplines and across countries. So basically, any researcher at any time in any place should be able to access the data that they need to analyze it, use it, test it, etc. In order to conduct their science and conduct their research, but also perhaps to make new scientific discoveries which would go back to the benefit of society. So a very grand vision, a very ambitious one, but none the same, not impossible, I believe. So the mission to achieve that vision is that we are trying to build the social and technical bridges that enable that open sharing and reuse of data and everything else. I think sharing and reuse are possibly a bit limiting in words, but the important part of this is that it's the social and the technical and the social bridges are the community and facilitating the community to come together to build trust, to build relationships, to build collaboration and it's equally as important as the technical challenges that they are trying to solve. Okay, and I think that we have achieved very, very well the social aspect of it with a big, large community that virtually and sometimes physically meet and the technical bridges are certainly building them, we're still building them and we have more to build, but it is an achievable mission. Everything that the Research Data Alliance does is based on these six guiding principles. They are, they underlie all the groups and the activities that go on, they underlie every single strategic decision that the governance bodies make, they underlie every decision that I make, and they are six important guiding principles of openness, consensus, its balance and all that's in terms of gender and geography and technology and domain, etc. Harmonization, that everything is community driven and that it's nonprofit and technology neutral. I'll say one word on that or one sentence on that last one because I often get the questions. What we mean by nonprofit and technology neutral is that we want to avoid technology locking in the outputs and the recommendations and the solutions that are identified within RDA. That does not mean that they cannot go on to be customized or integrated into a commercial organization or a commercial solution. However, what we advocate for and invite is for things to remain technology neutral and nonprofit from the basis of which they're given to via RDA and we don't actually have any IP or we just facilitate the access to these outputs and solutions. Okay. So it's designed, I mean, we facilitate the whole community and there are two pictures there. You see the first, the top one was a metaphor used many, many times, a little thousand flowers bloom. I'd say there's about a million flowers in that picture, but the concept is that, you know, throw the seeds down and let everything sort of with this grass root approach bloom and see what comes out. I think I prefer the second one, which is the hot house with the plants nurturing in the hot house. And what I do and my colleagues do in the governance aspect is sort of to facilitate that hot house so that the community can actually do the work in this grass roots approach and have the right conditions and be nurtured to grow into something, you know, of use for them and for others around the world. So it's an international, neutral and social platform. That's very important. There are many domain specific activities that go on internationally. There are many national activities that go on. We provide, it's important to understand that RDA is the international piece. It provides multi-cross and interdisciplinary activities. We encourage them strongly and it is a grass roots approach. So it's by the community and for the community. So before I tell you how things are done, I just tell you who are the research is the Research Data Alliance. We have 8,800 members from 137 different countries across the world. And as you see, clearly the European and US, there's quite a heavy Northern Hemispheric presence. Much of that is to do, I will tell you with a one-to-one relationship that many of all of our plenary meetings are one or two have taken place in Northern Hemisphere up until now and we always have an increase in members and we have a meeting. So we're hoping that obviously the March meeting in Australia next year will increase the Australian membership of RDA. But I'll talk a little bit about membership and the importance and the benefits of it now in a moment. Just to finish on the who is RDA part, we have most of our members are from academia and research, which is basically much of the focus. So we deal with research data. We deal with publicly funded data. The idea is what has been funded publicly should go back publicly. Yes. And that was the concept and the wish and the continued wish by our funders. That doesn't mean we're not open to enterprise, quite the opposite, but obviously it answers the question as to why we have so many from that, can we say, organizational type. So if you're not a member of RDA, very practically, there are a reason the way you can do it is you go to the website, you click registration, you complete the form, you, of course, we need you to adhere to the guiding principles that I explained to you before and you can submit it and then there's a maximum of a two working day approval period for the by the secretary, because we have a considerable amount of spam. So just for a moment, I'll say, why would you become a member of RDA? Well, first of all, you can access the information. We have mailing lists, newsletters, things that go out to our members. Obviously, you can manage that because a lot of people are worried about spam, but you can manage news subscriptions as you wish. The other reason is that we have, and I'll go on to explain the groups. We have 88 active groups at the moment. And if you wish to join a group or and you wish to get involved in a conversation around the group, we you need to be a member because we have you if you're going to be making posts and things like that. What I will say is and I often show this, I don't have it in the slide set is that we have a I talk about our membership in a sort of a pyramid like way. So at the top of my pyramid, I always I have the members who are drivers and they to me would be chairs of groups and members of governance boards, which are also volunteer activities, by the way. And then there's a middle layer, if you like, of co contributors to the RDA. So there are people who are maybe are not the driving the groups or sharing them, which requires a little bit of effort, but they are posting, supporting the work that's going on. And below we have a rather large group of what I call observers or users. And I always say that that's my 8700 members, every single one of them are welcome. Nobody is required to take a box to say they're going to drive to contribute or just observe or free to do what you like. And it is also true that much and it's not most of the information on the Research Data Alliance Web Platform is purposely open and accessible, even if you're not a member. OK, we encourage members because we would like to see you sign up and be part of our community. But I have to be openly honest and say that you don't actually need to do that to access most of the information you do to get involved in the groups. And of course, but not as I mentioned before and perhaps to attend our meetings and things. OK, so just briefly on Australia, we have about well, at the start of my tour, I had 350 Australian community members, which is about four percent of our membership. And I hope that will increase. But as I explained before, I have to be openly honest. I don't want it to be a success or a failure metric for anything because I have no idea the benefit that people get from or the even if they're not a member because, as I said, you can access many, many things. So important to be open and honest about that. What I do like about our member representation are members from Australia is that they represent 140 different organizations. So there's a wealth of information and a wealth of membership from Australia, even in that number. We have on the top of my little pyramid up there, 18 group chairs from Australia. That's a significant, by the way, influence and support from Australia. It's quite a high number. All of our groups have chairs from different regions. It's part of our requirement. But 18 who, by the way, are 18 individuals and some of them are chairing more than one group. So that's a very, very significant support from Australia. And I think that's important to outline. We have a council who provide our vision and our strategy. It's a nine member council elected every year. We have three new members and we're delighted that from this year we have Jill Ben. She's the University Librarian from University of Western Australia. And then, of course, we have a technical advisory board, which is also a volunteer board, and we have two members from Australia on that, looking out for the Australian community too. So Arnett from Frankie Stevens and Andrew Treloar from ARDC. And then we have a secretariat, which is part of the support that the funders from each region give. And the secretariat is made up of members from the US, Europe and Australia. And Stephanie Kethers is the director of operations of that secretariat. And she's from ARDC as well. So we have quite good connections and support from Australia. But I have learned an awful lot on this tour and I feel that we need to increase not so much the membership from the governance board perspective, but definitely the information that's coming out of Australia because there's so much going on. And I think that we're missing a little bit that connection there. But that's something that I think we can, with ARDC and the community from Australia, we can work on better. So I told you who was RDA. So what is RDA? And that's really the heart of it are the groups. Yes. So we have 88 active groups at the moment. We just did some weeding in our little garden or cleaning up the hothouse. And we have 32 of those are working groups. Working groups are very specific focused timed groups. So we say 12 to 18 months. Sometimes they go on to about 24. They're looking. They provide a very specific case statement. They provide an outline of how they're going, what they're going to develop in terms of tools or policy practices and things like that for data management. And they show a real use case and adoption for a specific community or group of communities or an organization. When they finished, they come to the end of their term. They come out with what we call recommendations and they can be concrete deliverables in the form of running code or APIs, tools, different tools, standards, et cetera. OK. And they and then when they when they've delivered that that goes through an endorsement public endorsement process. So the community has a chance to get back. That's part of our consensus and our community driven activity. On the other hand, so the other part are the interest groups. They are a much broader type of group. So as you see, we have 56 of those and they got last as long as they group is active. Yes, they focus on a solving a specific data sharing problem or a thing. But it's much broader and usually what happens is in these interest groups, well, activities do spring out and I'll show you some concrete outputs from these groups. But many times what happens is an idea comes from a group and then a working group is spun off from it. So a good example of that could be the data management plans interest group, which has been running for a long time. Still an active group, but maybe two years ago or a year and a half ago, they decided they want they needed to focus on two specific areas. One was the exposing data management plans and the other were the active data management plans. So they created two sub working groups and drove activity there. So it's a very practical example of how an interest group does its work. They meet of course again at plenary meetings and things like that. But they also come out with guidelines and best practices and things. And for example, one of a very popular one that I won't show you afterwards. So I'll mention now is the legal interoperability guidelines that has been out there. But we have, I think, 12 supporting outputs. Again, they go through a sort of community request for comment phase, but they're not. They don't go through the same process as the working groups. A word on standards, if I may, or DA specifically chose not to be a standards body. But when we were set up and designed, we modeled ourselves on the IETF. So the internet engineering task for us, which is a standards body. And the purpose of that was to ensure to assist and support any groups or any group of volunteers and members who wish to go down the standards road that they may already be in a position having gone through a series of different standards like processes. We chose not to be a standards body because we're so broad and we cover so many domains. But we do encourage our groups to go down the standards roads and support them where we can. So one of the things about we've 88 groups, as I told you, there's quite a, you know, quite a number of groups there. It's hard to navigate or DA and we appreciate that. We are just have launched last month this new search feature on the website, which helps a little bit to understand where what group could be of interest to you. There are a series of different focuses, as you see on the on the right side of the screen there, data management, data collection, policy, legal, etc. And then domain or field of expertise and or if they're not domain specific, we have many domain specific, but some who are not and you can search for them according to those different filters. A word, a word, I suppose of warning, if I may. It is work in progress and not all the groups are yet tagged under these particular focuses, but we feel it's a step in the right direction of trying to assist people to find and access information around the groups. So, as I mentioned before, so very briefly, we have these outputs, you have 19 recommendations, you could think of them like standards, if you like, and then these 13 supporting outputs. Okay, and I'm going to give you a couple of examples of outputs that have come out, but more than the outputs, the adoption of them. I show this story because it's, I think it's a nice example. So, all of our outputs, all of our activities, all of our work is done internationally and much of it virtually. Yes, that's the important thing so that so that the outputs that come out are of use and import and accessible to anybody. And the the the list that you see on the right side from one to six there are six different outputs from six different groups in RDA and INRA is the French National Agricultural Research Agency and they were have been involved, of course, in many of the first two in specifically, so the weak data activities on the agri semantics. But recently they defined they were redefining not just their in-house open science policy, but also their open science policy with reference to their grantees and those that they fund. And they say that and I believe them that these six outputs and plus their activity in RDA has contributed to many aspects of their newly defined open science policy. So this is an example of how little concrete outputs have come together to support an organisational and at the same time a discipline specific activity within an organisation. So that's a nice example to give you of an organisation one, albeit not in Australia. So here I give you one from Australia. I don't know if many of you on the call know the webinar know about the fortress seal, but fortress seal is a baby as I like to think for RDA in the sense that the data seal of approval and the world data system came together and formed a group under the Research Data Alliance and both of those DSA and WDS had certification requirements and standards around data repositories. And the wonderful thing about this story is not just the birth of the fortress seal, but the fact that they came together, they streamlined their certification and they reduced the number of standards in the world by one because they came together and had a defined one. So there are 140 repositories around the world and it's growing every day that have been certified. Some of them under DSA, some of them under WDS, since the fortress seal was launched, 61 repositories worldwide have been certified, gone through the certification and have received the fortress seal, of which three, as you can see, there are from Australia. So Cyro Data Access is the portal, the Australian Data Archive and the Australian Antarctic Data Center. So that's a very nice story as well of what activities to happen in RDA, how the outcome is then, if you like, a sustainable activity, but also how it's in real life been adopted in real life scenarios. And this is not an output from a working group, but an effort from an interest group. So the 23 Things Libraries for Research Data was a very, very practical guide. It's the one you see down in the corner of the screen there, the smaller A4 looking thing that delivered by the Libraries for Research Data Interest Group, one of our most active groups, may I say, and they're doing wonderful, wonderful things all the time, but they delivered to this output and it has been translated in 12 different languages as well. So at the time, the Australian National Data Service took this to pager and created a research data things program. That many, some of you on the call may have actually participated in it because I've discovered that many people at the meet and greet meetings have. It was attended or participated in by over 1,500 people. I understand through a community and online virtual exercise, but what I think is the wonderful output, well, there are many different things here that are important. The first is that this program was developed, the 23 Research Data Things, and made available for anybody to customize it and reuse it. And we have those examples of sort of domain adaptation, so the health and medical, the marine science, the tennis astronomy things, echo data, and I learned about the last two, by the way, on the tour. So there must be many, many more that we don't even know about. But so that's one thing that actually has been practically taken up by 1,500 people, that it has been adapted into domains and continues to be so. But also this is a way, a really wonderful example of how a regional partner has given something back to the world because this Research Data Things program, created by ANS, now ARDC, is available to anyone all over the world. So I think that's a lovely, lovely example as well of an adoption and output cases. Some other ones around the green are, by the way, the outputs from RDA and the white are the organizations in Australia that I have been made aware of that have adopted these outputs. I think what the important thing here is just to try and show you that there are many different activities going on and that some of the outputs being adopted are more technical, but there are others like the last one, the Weep Data Model, which are more domain specific and the Fair Sharing Registry was designed originally for bioinformatics, though it seems to have a broader interest in use across other domains too. So I've kind of given you an overview of RDA and what it is in a very much on a high level. So I understand, and I've learned this very much from all the meetings I've done and all the presentations I've done in my year and a half so far, that you never provide all the information because people come from so many different backgrounds and so many different interests. There are many starting points to RDA. As I told you, you can become a member. I think there's quite a low barrier of entry to RDA which I think is important too. Signing up will take a few minutes and then you can look and see and understand what you actually want to get out for what's in it for you. And of course, contact the secretariat and all my contact details are at the end of this, including the secretariat's one and we're there to help you. But ARDC does facilitate communities of practice, yes? And five of these, and you see them on the screen there and the five with the orange circles around them are actually directly linked to research data lines working in interest groups. So I think that could also be a way of staying informed and getting involved in RDA, but on a national level if you like. So people who are already aware of it can softly bring you in. Stephanie Kethers, who I showed you before as a member of our secretariat is very well informed of all the groups that we have. She's been with us since the very beginning and is also a great starting point and a person who will definitely point you in the right direction. But it would be useful to you to have a look at these communities of practice and see if there's one of them for you. Right, I'm coming towards the end now, but I must talk about the cleanery meetings because while my 8,700 members or 800 members are virtual and sadly I've never met them all and I don't think we'll ever all come together, but we do organize meetings every six months around the world. One to allow our wonderful community members, those that can come usually about five to 600, come together from all over the world to advance the work that the groups are doing, but also newcomers. We get a lot of newcomers to our meetings and new members and that's the important thing. That's why we change place. That's why we tried to have geographical balance in our meetings. There are always a great mix of people from different disciplines and domains and data science professionals. But they are working meetings. It's important to state that, of our working in interest groups, but there are ways in which new groups can and must be formed. So that can happen outside of the cleanery, but at the cleanery we have a mechanism called birds of a feather. As you know, birds of a feather flock together. So we invite new ideas for groups or discussions to take place at our cleanery meetings through birds of a feather and then the people can come together, see if there's an interest, form a group and decide will it be interest or working group and then progress it. Or indeed just say, well, you know what, maybe this is not really a topic that we want to discuss here and that's okay. But it is an opportunity to identify people and birds of a feather meetings, by the way, are really popular in our cleanery. So you don't have to provide the community or the thing you just give the idea and then the people will come, don't worry. We also present, of course, the outputs and adoption. So as Keith mentioned at the beginning, we are so delighted to finally after 15, after 14 cleaneries come to Australia. It will be next March from the 18 to the 20th in Melbourne. We're being very kindly hosted and supported by Cyro and of course with the support of the ARDC and the link is there and there'll be lots of information coming out about that, including deadlines and timelines. And of course that is a reason why you should become a member because you won't get the information if you don't subscribe to the mailing lists. You'll have to go and get it. But well, somebody said, I liked this because it's, and that usually at the meeting, Greek meetings, I have had some Australian members of the community speak, which is also different than me rabbitting on about how wonderful RDA is, but you want to kind of hear it from people on the ground. Sadly, I don't have that today. So I will just quote someone who said it and tweeted it, but people say, oh yeah, but the cleanery meetings are far away and I don't know if I can travel and things. And these words come from a chair, actually, of a group who has never been to a cleanery meeting and he says, don't let geography stop you. You see, you can very effectively take part remotely because we put a lot of effort into making this work and that's true. We facilitate remote access to all the meetings and areas. But he also says it's really important to note that it's a one-stop shop for best practices across not only your field, but related ones and you should make use of this. Yes. So I think there are nice words of wisdom and insights from a different perspective. Of course, our next cleanery meeting, I should tell you that because if you wanted to access remotely or come even better, it's taking place in Finland from the 23rd to the 25th of October. The only thing is I do know that many of you are interested and usually attend e-research Australia and that is clashing. But hopefully we'll have some sort of live connection or something going on. We would have remote access there. So finally, well, almost finally, just people have asked me and I do realize I explained it before that our cleanery meetings are working meetings and things but you can get a lot out of them and a little bit of preparation in advance is very, very important and useful and as you're having the cleanery in March, I think it's important to explain to you how that can happen. We will try and run a series of webinars and provide some documentation by the way to help people prepare in advance and get the most out of it or even just understand if it really is for you or not. But I kind of a brief overview on a checklist for the moment is that of course, if you can identify your area of interest and check the existing groups that you see on the RDA for you search feature that I showed you, if you don't find a group that is covering the area that you're interested in and specifically focused on, you could contact your international colleagues if you have some that you and throw out the idea of forming a group or proposing a birds of a feather and I plan your international idea. It's important to remember that you can start up the birds of a feather, you can start up an idea as solely a one geographic area, but if it leads on to an interest group or a working group, it must have international participation and international interest. Otherwise, it goes back to what I said at the very beginning for an international organization and we must, that's what it is. We facilitate people from across the world to come together. If it's a national or a regional thing, then there should be another platform for that but RDA would not be the correct one. You can then apply for a birds of a feather meeting at the plenary. I put October there because I can't remember exactly, we haven't defined them in concrete yet, but around October, November, the call for sessions and meetings takes place so it's a good idea to keep the timing in your head. Note that as I said, we will provide updates and insights into that. And then if the birds of a feather is approved, you prepare well and you've got 90 minutes as I say to conquer the globe or to find people with the common interest in that goal and to shape up something for the future. So I think that I hope that I have explained to you a little bit and a very high level about the Research Data Alliance. It is a wonderful community of collaborative, cooperative and co-creative people. I like that word co-creative because that's actually what RDA itself is. It's a co-creation from funders across the world wishing for the same outcome. I like this a la African proverb and I've been using it for quite a while now, but I feel that it's very appropriate to RDA. If you want to go fast, you can go alone. And someone said to me about RDA, yeah, it's not the fastest. There's a bit of a slow burn, but I agree, but we do have timings in the things and two years is not so bad. Somebody said, oh, three years to do their ISO certification recently. So I don't think that 12, 18 or 24 months is that much because if you go together and if you get the people together and you discuss it, you come up with new ideas and you have sounded it out, you have tested it. So I fully believe that if you want to go far, go together. That's what RDA is all about, going together. I'd like to give a word of special thanks to our Australian champions. The Australian National Data Service has supported RDA since the very beginning. Of course now you all know better than I has merged with Nectar and RDS to be the Australian Research Data Commons, but I'm really, really grateful of the support that we have received since 2012 and continue to receive from ARDC. And they are, as I said, our Australian champions and I hope that together with them we will be able to support the community in, and as I said, I go back to say again, I have heard many, many things on this tour. I have found out lots of wonderful things that are going on in Australia. You have a wonderful activity of a great community, a great size as well, do a lot of community work. I feel that RDA can offer you an awful lot of support and benefit, need to elevate the activity that's going on in Australia internationally and then also understand how can RDA support you in your challenges and institutional and organisational challenges. So thank you very much for your patience. It's really weird not to see you all, but that's there, my contact details will make you a bit, if you call it, the slides available later on, I'm sure. Okay, thank you very much, Hilary. That was great, wonderful overview of what the Research Data Alliance is and how people can get involved.