 Great. Thank you. Welcome everybody to this session on the ARDC Research Link Australia project. So my name is Natasha Simons and I'm the Associate Director for National Information Infrastructure at the ARDC and I will be your host for this webinar. Next slide please, me. So I'd like to start by with an acknowledgement of country. So I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respect to their elders past, present and emerging. So Wunya from Turbul and Yagura Country in Brisbane. Next slide please, Ming. So the agenda for today, we will talk you through the Research Link Australia project. So I think some of you have heard about this and some of you have heard a bit more than others. So we will go through what the project is and how it came about. We will go through a summary of the stakeholder consultation, which was part of stage one of the project. We'll then look at potential data sources and challenges for the Research Link Australia project and then review the project timeline and some upcoming activities and we'll end with a call for participating. So look at how you can get involved in this project should you wish to. So we have a number of speakers today. The whole webinar is presented by the project team and I will leave it to them to introduce themselves and we are kicking off with Adrian Burton, who's our deputy CEO. So over to you Adrian. You're on mute. I was having a coughing fit as you were just warming up. Hi everyone. The Research Link Australia program is kind of an initiative that comes through Encriss, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. This is a Commonwealth Government strategy to provide national capabilities where local or institutional capacity just wouldn't be enough to get the scope and scale of the ambition that we're looking for. And so the Commonwealth Government has this program called Encriss. It's a kind of build that scale for some specific initiatives. There are 24 current projects in the Encriss program and the ARDC focuses in on national research data infrastructure and digital capabilities. On the next slide, we've got the specific project that we're looking at today. It was funded specifically through Encriss and I'll get into why the specifics came into place. But the mechanics of it is that there's an 18 month project running from October 22 to March 2024. And we're looking to get our first minimum viable product by that stage. But there is a 48 month plan to really embed this within the whole research information ecosystem in Australia. We're using a co-design approach and you'll get the report on the initial sort of consultation and participatory design elements of the program. That's because we understand that this kind of a project really requires buy-in from everyone. The project itself, just before we get there, what we're looking at is to bring together information about the research sector and about the private sector, business sector to catalyze collaboration. The reason why, the policy reasons why we might be interested in such an initiative, go back to reports from the OECD that Australia wasn't particularly well placed for industry research translation and there's a number of policy initiatives that have been going through government. It's not really just because it's a policy issue. The mission of research organisations in Australia almost always includes contributing to the broader society beyond the research sector and specifically collaborating with industry to catalyze and to improve industrial processes and business processes through the application of research. So this really is what research organisations are setting out to do and similarly industry partners are setting out to really transform the way they do business. So we're not just doing this because of these policy initiatives but there are very strong policy initiatives at the moment and our program has been funded as part of the research commercialisation initiative and the Accelerator initiative. I think we move on to those next slides. Why would the ARDC be involved in such a project? We are within that increased program, provide a number of national information services, a national catalogue to find data from any research organisation in Australia. We run national identifier services and collaborate with the AF and others to provide services like ORCID and DOIs for data sets and these are part of the information that allows you to link up information across the whole research sector. So that gets us to the problem statement that we're trying to look at and that will be in the next slide. So the problem of all the things around research industry, research business collaboration, the thing that we are looking to focus on in this project is the information gap. There are lots of things to do with commercialisations, a very, very big agenda that spans multiple government departments and multiple organisations. The thing that we're looking for is to look at that information gap. There's no very easy way to get an overview of research capability in Australia and there's no simple way for researchers to understand where interests might be for their work. So what we are looking at as part of that whole Jigsaw piece puzzle, the puzzle we're really focusing at is how would we create a national research information data asset and I will repeat that again. So what would be the information about research, all the capability that there is and the interest for business application, how could we as a national infrastructure organisation build that up as a national asset for the whole sector? Because the ARDC is not looking necessarily to do all the, is not looking at all, in fact, doing all the research industry collaboration in Australia. We're just looking to facilitate it through bringing the information together and so this asset could be used by multiple research organisations, industry organisations, by specific groups that do the brokerage. There's a lot of broker groups that we'll hear about, we heard about in the consultation. So what we're looking for is what is that information infrastructure that could support that kind of an activity. Other people doing the industry research collaboration and we have increased facilities that have specialist areas of research infrastructure and specialist industry partners. ARDC is not looking to replace any of that all we're trying to do is to bring an extra piece here to join up the information about all those different pieces in the information ecosystem. So that's what we feel that we can bring to the table. We're also an operator of these kind of national information infrastructures. So it's not sort of extra business for us to run an information system to make sure that the identifiers are all linked up between industry partners and research organisations. That's not extra business for us, that is our core business and so we're looking to collaborate with all the parties that are engaged in research industry, research business collaboration. We are looking to partner with them to provide an underpinning national information capability that would support the work that's happening there. We thoroughly also expect that it won't be the only information system but it would be the core underpinning network of information upon which third parties could build much more specialist applications that would be specific to particular areas and so we're looking to really be the key organisation that's joining up information about research capability and about about industry interest. So that's our objective and we're really looking to partner with a number of organisations to pull that off. I think I'll stop there and let's get on to reporting on the consultation process so far. Thanks agent to provide that context. Next I will provide a summary from the stakeholder consultation phase. So my name is Min Fang Wu. I'm product manager of this project. So just emphasise what the agent said, what the focus of this project. So as we know the challenge to research and to industrial collaboration are many and a multi-staged but we focus on the filling the information gap to develop and provide a rich and a shared research capability information system to connect researchers and innovators. With that in mind, we start stakeholder consultation to ensure we design the right thing. This consultation will help us to understand rather than assume the challenges, needs, opportunities for this research in Australia platform. So on this slide we these are the organisations and we have consulted in our stage one consultation. We will contact these consultations throughout the project but here is what we find from the stage one. In the stage one, we talk to public funded research organisations such as SIROS and universities and government agencies and funders. For example, we talk to people from department of industry, department of finance, health and education and funders like ARC and HMRC. For the business sectors, we haven't had a chance to have individual person-to-person talk but to understand that sector we are based on desktop research. So as you may have know, SIROS publishes this report about SMME enablers and barriers and the department of industry also did this comprehensive study about how enable research and industrial collaboration. So based on these consultations, we summarise the obstacles, pain points and need opportunities and benefit for each of these three sectors. These slides and the following two or three slides are there for your reference. I wouldn't go to detail but provide some highlights of obstacles, pain points, that's where the RIA could potentially leverage and provide the benefit to as a reliever of those pain points. For example, for government funding bodies and they have complex, they have lots of initiatives to push research and industrial collaboration. However, these initiatives are complex and are held by different state holders. As a result, not many business or researchers are fully aware of those funding opportunities. And because those research capability information are held by different state holders and the government and their agencies don't have information to have a bird eye view with the national research capability. And for industrial and business, their pain points include the know which government funding they are eligible to apply and it's hard to find research collaborators and groups and also cultural things, not knowing how to engage with researchers and research organizations. And some researchers have a good record in research but not necessarily willing or want to collaborate with industry. And when industry people reach out to researchers, could lead to nowhere. So that's kind of pain point industrial business facing. And for research sectors, there are only small number of researchers who build their network with industrial partners and these people are usually like senior or high-profile researchers, they act as brokers to connect the research and industry. They want to have this work done professionally by someone else, they want to concentrate in their research. And also cultural things, research not knowing what the collaboration readiness and the fitness of business partners. And among across all these three sectors, we find there are a group of people, we call them facilitators. Their routine job is to make a connection between research and industry and help them and as they do more than make connections, they also have each step of the collaboration process. And those people could, you know, they could be from research, industrial innovation facilitators. For example, the department of industry funded a small and a medium enterprise connect program. They could become from government or state government tech innovation centers or from research office, commercialization office or business development office from universities. But also could be company, they provide specialized brokerage surveys to either of those sectors. So through this consultation, we collected about 70 user cases. Here are the four user stories we summarized from those user cases. For example, as a policymaker, research funder or national program initiative, they would like to know national research capabilities in biodiversity so they can direct funding effectively and efficiently. Or as an application developer of equity business, they would like to know who are the top five researchers from their state in their, in the research area of Internet of Things. So these researchers could help them to optimize their network to monitor soil water, you know, all this things impact on the farm productivity. Or as a research group, the, this research group, the research nanodisc and find these special nanomaterial working better than other other shaped discs in response to, in response to tumor treatment. They are looking for top five manufacturers in Australia. They can discuss potential production opportunities. So this story will be a consideration for our minimum viable product to address. So that's a summary from the initial consultation phase. We analyzed pinpoint opportunity and benefit for each sector. Those initial insight, if you would like to, we will still continue to the consultation. If you would like to talk to us, please yeah, contact any of us on the project team. So next will be my colleagues, Yana, will provide a summary of potential data source and challenges. Thank you. Thank you, Ming. We can roll. So this being information infrastructure, this will be underpinned by data. And that could come from any of the sectors. It are from government research business, as well as any of the brokers in between. And say, for example, from the research side, we are looking to understand the research capability. But in addition to that, we are also interested to understand the capacity, the interest and the cultural fit, as well as the administrative or infrastructure availability. So when I say cultural fit, it's the researcher might be fully capable, but they may not have an interest in pursuing an industry collaboration. And similarly, they should be available at that time, their capacity in addition to the capability. So the capability part is fairly easy to somewhat easier to determine because researchers have outputs and they put out various in various forms, including publications and so on. And the researchers can very well be identified with their orchid IDs. And so as well as their outputs can be obtained. And similarly on the industry side, there is business profiles of the industry and the organizational IDs of the industries and their understanding of the research, etc. would become important. And from government, the grants that government as well as a funder sector, the grant information, both wins and losses, the tax eligibility, IP, information, etc. might actually come into play. But if you could move to the next one. So not all information is equal. So as you can see, the ones in blue are relatively easier to obtain. But the ones in yellow, what would require information input from the sector. And so say, for example, we can determine the organizational idea of a business fairly easily, we can get the industry classification and of the of the industry. But on the other hand, it to knowing exactly what that organization does in relevance to research. And it would be as well as their maturity in R&D or their interest in consuming R&D would be something that we might need to get more information about. So to cut the long story short, maybe if you could roll to the next one. So these are some of the highlights of information that we would to start with, we would like to obtain from other organization participants like yourselves and your organizations. So for example, from government grants, we can get from a number of grants what are the successful ones. But if you are able to get the unsuccessful proposals as well. And similarly in the in that that would be that would add a lot of value in terms of learning and so on. Having said that none of the sensitive information needs to be revealed or by you or by us through this portal, but nonetheless knowing what broadly what is available is useful. And partnership of current and potential partnerships directories of brokers and intermediaries, some of which we may be able to construct ourselves. But if there is anything that is available, we would like to hear more. And business profile as well as about the engaging or potentially engaging industries, what they do, what's their understanding of the research and the research as interest and capacity to collaborate. So in to cut the long story short, I will be seeking out some of these information reaching out to various organizations. But if you have this information on that, you would be able to share, we would be very keen to hear from you as well. Thank you. And then I would hand over to Lyle of project management. Thanks, Mink you fall to the next slide. So it's for me to give you a bit of a cook's tour of what's going to happen coming up in this current phase that we're in. So at the moment, we're working on a kind of co design intensive stage. I'll drill down a little bit on each of the activities that are going to be happening at this stage. I'll sort of answer also Jeff's question in the comments there as well at the same time. So the intent is not to use open data. We're not excluding anything at this point, Jeff. I think we're actually, this is the reason why we're doing co design. What you mentioned about confidentiality causing issues is absolutely correct. But we want to work through that with the community. I think this is the reason why we're doing this. One of the overarching our advice coming out of the first phase was that the only way this is going to work is if we are doing this in co design with those people out there who are aware of all the challenges. So next slide please me. So the heart of this a series of open co design workshops. There's going to be four progressive service or business level workshops interspersed with a number of technical workshops. The service or business level workshops will be focused conversations with a number of different types of stakeholders is what we're aiming to do stakeholder horizontals is what we're calling one group of those. These are the people that can help us to understand the systemic challenges and the information ecosystem challenges that are out there because they are from organizations that are dealing with facilitating industry and research collaboration on a day to day basis or because they are data scientists. They're ordinarily accessing the same types of information to try and provide better insights to their organizations about what's going on. We also need to focus on what we're calling stakeholder verticals. Ideally we'd like to focus on a few national research domains, national priorities or national initiatives. The idea there is to make sure that whatever it is that we build under the research link Australia service or recent link Australia platform or infrastructure can actually flexibly support what different stakeholders needs are going to be in that might include customization as well. Next slide. The reason why we're structuring it this way is some of the overarching advice coming from the initial consultation phase. Two key pieces there besides that we absolutely must do this in co design is that the very first is that we should be boosting the success of others who are doing the same sorts of whose goals are to actually facilitate linking and research and industry. That was that facilitator stakeholder group that Ming highlighted in her slide. The other piece of overarching advice was that we have to have a balanced approach. Not only do we need to drive systemic information ecosystem improvement but we should actually focus on a couple of communities of specific need to prove that what it is that we're doing can actually support some communities. Next slide. So going now into the the technical workshops that I mentioned three of which we're planning to be interspersed with the the higher level service workshops. These are going to be based on a working demonstrator or a prototype platform. So they're going to be actually something for people to look at and iterate over. At this point we're seeking people who cannot help but think about what this thing needs to look like. So if that's you we'd really love you to be involved. We are looking for people who are probably going to be routine users of such a product or routine users of searching and linking. That's part of their current job or we're actually looking at people who are involved in aggregating similar data sets because that's a part of our remit to provide greater access to information or those who are consuming similar aggregated data sets i.e. machine readable ways. Next slide. So what is it we're hoping to get out of this code design phase? A number of things first off the the prototype that we're working on we're hoping will be sort of finalizes proof of concept for the pilot system that we're going to build and we'll need some technical requirements coming from that as well as to you know how to implement that. The one of the goals there as Adrian mentioned is it to be a part of ARDC's national services so that that's what's going to happen in the next phase. We're hoping to encode design prioritize with our stakeholders what types of new content sources are most important. We're not going to wait until the end of that phase to start negotiating access to information sources that we we have identified as being important. At the end of this we'd also like to know what our service model should look like what should RLA do in order to better support other people's capabilities to complement capabilities not to replicate and to plug gaps that people are actually experiencing. We're back back one more back one more thank you and we're also hoping for a shared strategic framework to come out of that. I'll talk a bit more about that in the previous phase sorry in the next slide in the next phase sorry get back me I didn't mean to say next slide. In the next stage we will be then implementing a system that will turn into our pilot service that does not mean that this service will be finished or perfect at that point in time. At the moment we're targeting that towards sort of November timeline to be implemented and then on into quarter one quarter two next year will be what we're calling the minimum viable product platform so code design will continue on that pilot service. This won't be people's last chances to actually tell us how we're going and how we need to improve things if that makes sense. Yeah next slide. So we're also understanding that what we need to do is come up with a shared strategy that's not just a strategy that's relevant to Research Link Australia but relevant to everyone who has a stake in this particular information ecosystem improving specifically for the purposes of of linking industry and research. So as a part of this shared strategic framework at the end of the stage we're hoping for a draft of that we think it has to include a vision that vision should include where RLA is situated in the wider ecosystem but also what the future of that ecosystem needs to look like necessarily that should include information standards what's the current state where do we need to get to in information improvement in order to make these things work and what are our future linking requirements what can we do now but what do we need to work on in the future. We think that a trust framework is a part of this relevant to Jeff's comment. We think that the information not only needs to be able to be trusted trustworthy itself but we need to be handling this in a trusted way we need to be concerned with privacy or ethics working through these things the goal is for an environment that enables sharing and reuse not just use through Research Link Australia that makes sense to people. We also need to look at sustainability how are we going to govern this thing going forward how are we going to ensure that the community is driving the evolution of this and then drilling down the details of that evolution how do we improve Research Link Australia how does that evolve making sure that we're meeting changing environment changing people's needs next slide another thing we're doing during this period is seeking a number of early test projects these will be early adopters we're hoping that will become test cases for using the pilot service the other thing that we're doing is helping us to trail blazer model for how we work with future projects these might be funded projects going on in the future these to be determined so if anyone's interested in becoming that type of early user we'd really like to talk to you what are we expecting we're expecting partners to be committed to this co-design phase with us we expect there to be a lot of discussion with these particular partners and because of that ARDC will provide a lot of support in planning any potential projects we're looking for projects that test several aspects of Research Link Australia so that might be providing us with the information or working on improving the information environment or consuming information and we're hoping that these will demonstrate a clear and practical current need to be able to reach to link research and industry next slide so that's about it for the Cope Cooks tour one last thing to mention as as being highlighted while we did focus a little on the industry side of things we didn't get down to the specific conversation with a range of industry people therefore we'll be continuing industry consultation during this stage depending on how that goes that might transition into co-design workshops with industry as well if we can find the opportunities to do that next slide so this is a bit of a wrap up slide how is it that you could participate in Research Link Australia we've got a couple of different levels first off if you just want to track our progress or even if you want to participate in Research Link Australia in any other way you can now go to our our recently released website the QR code and the link is there it'll be on the next slide too and register your interest on that web page for following us we'll provide you with further updates and information about events or seminars including the co-design workshops to cover multiple bases the usual way to get information from ARDC particularly seminars and workshops and events we'll be putting out information that way as well we'd love you to come with us on this co-design journey to help us build this Research Link Australia platform and to work on the information ecosystem in general so we'd love it if you can come along to one or more of the upcoming workshops to commence late in May we haven't released information about that yet but they will be released via those channels at the top of the page also if you're interested in being an adopter or an early adopter of Research Link Australia I'd encourage you to attend the co-design workshops to learn more and to start having a conversation with us as soon as possible and just to let everyone know you know we don't intend for the feedback and the co-design to finish at the end of this phase of workshops and seminars there'll be plenty of opportunity to provide feedback as we go along next slide me so we're at the state that's it perfect we're at we're kind of at the end of the structured part and we'd like to actually accept some questions and you leave up the QR code there