 Okay, good afternoon or good morning depending on your time zone and welcome to this Q&A webinar for the expression of interest phase of the platform's open call for the Australian Research Data Commons. We have, so my name is Andrew Traul and with me is Kerry Leavitt. Kerry is assisting me with the administration of the open call and is responsible for all of the process and laziness associated with the call. Any fuzziness or detriments to the call accrue to me, not to her. So Kerry do you want to, do you want to say hi? Hi, thanks Andrew. Yeah, I'm a Research Data Consultant with AIC and I'm still allied, so yeah, please ask any questions and yeah, thanks Andrew. Okay, thanks Kerry. So the purpose of this call is really to give you an overview of how we're proposing to structure the open call and in particular this particular phase of the open call. We have over 80 people registered for this particular webinar currently 62 online and as a result, it's not going to be possible to allow you to ask questions via microphone. It just becomes a disaster once you get over above 20. However, you'll notice that there is a questions box in your interface. Feel free to ask questions as we go through and I'll attempt to address them and then obviously there'll be plenty of time for questions at the end. So I have eight slides that I really just want to use to structure what I say about the platform's open call and the life phase. I'm happy to take questions after each of those slides and then as I say once I finish the initial presentation, then the bulk of this session is intended for Q&A. We are recording this particular presentation, this webinar and so if you have colleagues who are unable to attend this session, they will be able to watch the recording later and obviously we're very happy to answer questions after the webinar concludes and their contact details are on the final slide. So thank you for your interest in this particular open call and let me now move to the presentation to give you a sense of what we're trying to do and how we're trying to do it. So Software and Platforms is one of the four strategic pillars within the ARDC. So it's one of the major strands of work that we're proposing to do over the next few years. And within Software and Platforms, we have a particular set of objectives for our new Platforms investment. So a number of you will be familiar with the virtual laboratories that Nectar, RAN and the Dharma Enhanced Virtual Laboratories that the ARDC has been more recently funding. Platforms builds on that and what we try to achieve with the overall Platforms investment is firstly to enable more sustainable e-research platforms and the reason we want things that are more sustainable is it provides more value for money from the Australian taxpayers' investment and it means that it's more likely that those platforms will continue after the initial investment for the ARDC. Second thing we're trying to bring about is we want to make it possible for new Platform Entrants to be successful in attracting investment. Nigel, yes, the slides will be made available after the talk and we'll probably link them from the web page or we'll email the details to people. But yes, absolutely the slides will be made available. So we want to attract new Platform Entrants. The virtual laboratories and the Dharma Enhanced Virtual Laboratories for a variety of reasons were only that open to a particular segment of the Australian research population and we'd like to expand that out. The third objective for the Platforms investment is to expand access. So we want more Australian researchers to have access to Platforms technologies enabling them to carry out their work. This is essentially about improving the way in which researchers around the country can work and to make sure that the benefits of our co-investment are spread as widely as possible. And the fourth thing we're trying to do is to bring together a community of platform developers or platform adapters in part to ensure that good practice gets shared around and in part to improve the ROI by ensuring that we have more productive, more supported developers. So those are the overall objectives for the Platforms call. And those objectives in turn drive a number of the aspects of this call that are different to what this has done in the past. And you'll see some of the implications of those objectives showing up in some of the later slides. So one of the questions that I know I'm going to get asked is what's in scope, what's out of scope? So in scope, and this should not be thought of as an exhaustive list, I'm happy to have people contact me and say what about this? In scope, first of all, adoption of an existing platform and implementation by a new or expanded community in Australia. So taking something that's already in use in one place and implementing it in Australia. Also in scope is taking an existing platform and adapting it to a new community in a different area of research. We've had some examples of that in the past with Nectar and with NADC. Now that might require some associated work on additional integrations for new data sources and tools, but it's essentially taking an existing platform and adapting it. Thirdly, might be support for taking a generic, a relatively generic platform solution and making it easier for people to adopt that. So those are the three initial in scopes. And then we've had some questions already about things that potentially could also be in scope, which I think are in scope. So taking an existing solution and re-engineering it, essentially to make it more sustainable. That might involve picking up existing shared services. It might involve moving to a microservices architecture, changing some of the aspects, the underlying code base. I think that that's going to be in scope as well. And people have also said to me, well, wait a minute, what if we want to just run a set of services? We don't want to build an entire platform or deploy an entire platform. We'd just like to provide a set of services that is also in scope. What is out of scope? And I've already had some feedback on the platform strategy discussion document about this. We're not interested in funding development of a new platform technology. So this is something that Nectar did. It's not something that the ARDC wants to do for a variety of reasons, which I can go into in the Q&A time. But that's out of scope. We are not interested in paying for licenses of a commercial off the shelf solution. And we are by and large not interested in developing significant additional new functionalities. So if you would like to build a cool new tool or a cool new visualization environment for a particular field of research, that's out of scope as well. And I understand that some of the people on this call desperately want to do some combination of those things. And I'm sorry, but we really are interested in making the money go as far as possible and avoiding brand new stuff. And in fact, the text that's in our platform strategy specifically talks about preferring adoption, first of all, if you can't adopt something, then adapt it. If you can't adapt it, then build something as an absolute last resort. And so this is consistent with that. Peter Walters asked whether with respect to scope, whether this is restricted just to researchers, or whether it can include government industry in the general community. If you would like to develop something that would be of benefit to government industry or general community, and it looks like it's a good and fundable thing, then that's fine. We're not saying this has to be researcher only. So that's certainly a possibility. So that's what's in scope and what's out of scope. If I can now turn to the pra, so Nigel's asked me a follow up question, can a commercial off the shelf software solution be part of the solution? The answer to all such questions Nigel is, it depends. Talk to me about it. If the commercial off the shelf solution is 90% of the cost, it's probably not. 10% of the cost, probably yes, where the dividing line between 90 and 10 sits, I don't know. Very happy to have a conversation about it though. So in order to get an open call that meets some of our objectives, we have spent quite a lot of time thinking about how to come up with a process that is as transparent as possible, that enables new entrance to the research sector, and that rewards collaboration of the competition. One of the comments that was made to me late last year, by someone who I won't identify, but who I'm sure will recognise this comment, is that a purely competitive process means that people don't collaborate, and we want to encourage collaboration. So we're trying to build a process that will reward collaboration, and that flows through in particular into the design of the EOI. So the dimensions of what we're talking about. So I've talked about what's in scope. I've talked about how we're trying to design the process. The dimensions of what we're talking about are projects that won't run from one to four years. And that's because we have currently four years of ARDC funding next year, because we're doing this proposing to do this call every year. Next year, that would be one to three years. The year after would be one to two years. So the reasons one to four for this call is that that takes us through to the end of our current funding envelope. So you can put in submissions for a two-year project, three-year project, four-year project, or indeed a one-year project. We have a total pool each call of $3 million, which means that there is $3 million or less per year of investment per project. Now, that essentially means we could fund one of $3 million project or $3 million one-dollar projects or something in between. I'm expecting something in between. If you would like to propose that we only fund your idea, you can do that. That would be a bold move. Some might describe it as greedy. I would encourage you not to do that. But that's the funding envelope that we are working with. There is a mandatory one-to-one cash co-investment. So if you are proposing a $3 million project, you need to have $3 million of co-investment per year from partners, which I imagine will gauge demand a little bit. And you need to have a legal entity as your lead because we have to do contracts. So we're going to have to write a contract with someone who can enter into a contract. I note that there's a number of questions coming in that I would actually, I'll take them at the end of the talk rather than try and do them now. So those are the kind of constraints that we're working within. And as I said, we've tried to design a process that is as transparent as possible and supports collaboration as much as possible. And so the best way to think about the construction of this call is that we have three phases. The first phase is what we call the expression of interest phase. That's the focus of this webinar. And the point of that is that it is designed to be collaborative and it's designed to be lightweight. So this is for anyone to say, I think I, well, not even I think, it would be good if there was a platform that did this or a service that did that or a community whose needs are this that need to be met. So it's quite exploratory and it's designed to be low effort to put up an idea. There is a template and we'll provide links to the template as part of the documentation immediately after this webinar. But think of it as a two page template, essentially. So quite lightweight, quite high level. The point of the EOI phase, which runs for the next month or so, is to enable us to see what ideas people are proposing and bring groups together and to enable other people to see what ideas people are proposing and contact them. So this is what I'm calling the coordination phase. So that might be proposed or initiated. Someone might say, oh, that group's proposed this thing, which is very similar to what we want to do. Let's talk to them about putting in a joint proposal. It might be ARDC initiated. So one of the things we'll be doing is looking at those expressions of interests and trying to broker, facilitate discussions with people. Or it might even be initiated by existing groupings. So for instance, the Australian Characterization Informatics Committee is an existing coordination mechanism for activities in that space. They might, for instance, decide to put in a joint proposal using their existing coordination mechanisms. In a sense, the ARDC kind of doesn't care. What we care about is that we get the strongest possible proposals coming into the final phase and that these are proposals that have a greater degree of buying. So lightweight expression of interest, coordination phase, that is going to be a little bit more fluid and in fact quite different to a conventional process. And then we move into the formal request for proposal phase, which is inevitably going to be more competitive and where we're going to ask for much more detailed documentation. Now, I toyed with whether I wanted to write the word competitive or not, but the reality I suspect is that there will be more proposals coming in than we have funds to support. And so inevitably, we're going to have to make decisions about what we're able to fund, what we're not able to fund. And that's another one of the reasons why we would like there to be a smaller number of really high quality proposals at this phase rather than lots of smaller ones. The kinds of ways in which we might see coordination opportunities arising, and this is not an exhaustive list by the way, this is just an existing list as a starting point. So we might say, look, these three proposals are all from the same discipline. We'd encourage you to talk together or proposals that are using similar classes of data generating or data collecting instruments or that are using similar or indeed identical software tools. By the way, the instruments and software tools, we saw examples of both of those during the data and services discovery activities, groups that were essentially proposing to do very similar things that we're able to bring together. I can imagine groups proposing use of similar platform technologies. Again, we'd encourage them to come together or groups that are proposing similar opportunities for use of shared services. This is not an exhaustive list that me emphasise, these are just the kinds of things that we're going to be looking for collaboration opportunities around. The timings for all of this, the EI opens today. The facilitation will start some period thereafter. Obviously, it's difficult to facilitate one expression of interest. Once we have more than one, we'll start looking for opportunities to do facilitation. And that will run through until the 20th of September. So the EI will close in about a month's time. A little bit after that, we will release the RFP template and a final set of weighted selection criteria. So there is a platform's open call overview document on the ARDC website, which has an initial set of selection criteria to give you a sense of the kinds of things we care about. Before people are asked to submit the RFP, they will have a much more detailed set of selection criteria with weightings. So you can see exactly what we care about. The facilitation period will end a week after the EI closes, so that if there are late EI submissions, we have an opportunity to do some facilitation. And then the RFP itself formally opens on the 7th of October and closes on the 1st of November. Now, the reason for those dates is that we want to be able to announce to people well before the end of the year, ideally by late November, whether they've been successful or not. And in an ideal world, and assuming that university solicitors can resist the temptation to add value, we would hope to have contracts at least sent out before the end of the year. So the driver for some of these timings is that we would like people to have a degree of surety about whether or not they've been successful in a funding proposal before the end of the current devil extension funding. So that's the driver for the timings. The contact details for questions after this webinar finishes are there for me and for Kerry. And what I might now do is work my way through the questions that I haven't yet got to. And I'll just, essentially, happily answer questions until I stop coming in. So one of the questions was, ADC used to fund a set of virtual laboratory projects. Indeed, we continue to fund a set of data-enhanced virtual laboratory projects. With the platform's open core, will you continue to support the existing VLs? The answer is not in their current form. So the virtual laboratories had a round of devil continuity funding until the middle of this year, roughly. They have a round of devil extension funding through to the end of this year for the existing VLs under that funding vehicle, that co-investment vehicle. There will be no ongoing, necessary ongoing funding beyond that. Question that I've been asked already is, okay, so you're doing this new platform's open core, what does that mean for the existing VLs? And the answer is that they are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged with respect to the core. They're welcome to put in proposals and they will get no favored treatment relative to a new proposal from a group we've never heard of. So I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. We've got a question about whether the questions from others can be viewed. I will have to take that on notice. I don't know whether the recording of the webinar includes the questions that are being asked. I suspect the answer to that is no, but I don't know for sure. And so I'll ask. There's a question about what does cash co-investment mean? So what we're trying to get at there is that if the project, let's assume someone puts forward a proposal for a $1 million project. So that means that the total cost of the project is gonna be a million dollars, ARDC will provide half of that investment. So the other half of that investment will need to come from elsewhere. It doesn't mean that cash has to flow to the ARDC. It simply means that if, for instance, the bulk of your project cost is salaries, which is often the case for these sorts of things, then the ARDC will fund half of the salaries and the other half of the salaries will have to be funded elsewhere. There is a requirement on, or there will be a contract requirement that the projects provide a statement of the finances for the project as a whole that can be audited. And we actually need to provide that information back to the Department of Education to indicate the degree of co-investment associated with the things that we're investing in ourselves. So we actually need to know those numbers in order to report back to the department. Question of clarification is the $3 million per year, the total ARDC bucket or the maximum limit for any given project. The answer is it's both. That is, we have $3 million a year to spend. In theory, we could spend it on a single project. I think that's highly unlikely. Could happen, don't think it's going to, but it's the total bucket amount. And be aware that that is per year per call. What I mean by that is that the ARDC will be investing $3 million in the first call and then presumably continuing to fund a number of those projects in years 234 at the same time as a new investment in year two for new projects that come on. So the amount of money that the ARDC is proposing to invest over the lifetime of the platform's open call is closer to $28 million. So it's significantly more than three times four because we need to fund those multi-year projects or invest in those multi-year projects at the same time as investing in new projects that come along in the later calls. Question about whether a quote real commitment of an existing staff member to this project is considered to be cash. If that person is not being backfilled, that is they're simply being assigned to this project, I guess that's the equivalent of someone working on the project full-time. What we're trying to get away from is the kind of co-investment numbers that say, oh, someone's being provided 0.1 as co-investment. If someone is working on the project 1.0 and not doing something else, then I think that would probably count as cash but I'll need to double check that. There is a question about whether there was going to be a similar call for data and services. I don't think that's a safe assumption. So for data and services, we've had a set of discovery projects which are currently underway. Those projects are going to feed into a data and services summit. It's going to be held on the Monday ahead of the research. What comes out of that, I don't know. I'm not responsible for the data and services theme that is Adrian Burton. But because there's going to be a national summit looking at potential data investments, I think it's premature to speculate on what kind of investments will be associated with that. There is a question about whether we plan to cull EOIs so that not everyone goes to RFP. Cull is a harsh word. We are hoping to encourage people who submit EOIs to come together so that there is a smaller number of RFPs. But if we get the same number of proposals as we got expressions of interest, it's going to make our selection task more difficult, but that's okay. We can deal with that. It was something that triggered for me. It'll come back to me. Question about how much do you anticipate the total funding bucket allocated to this platform investment to be committed in the first round, i.e. what's being ring fenced for the second and third year. Next question, as I think I indicated in an earlier answer, we are proposing to do this every year for the next three years and we're proposing to allocate the same amount of money each year for new investments. So assuming there are no changes to the internal budget allocation within the ARDC and there may be, but at the moment that's not anticipated, assuming there are no changes, I would anticipate a similar size call for new projects in 2020. So you're perfectly within your rights to submit an EOI this year and decide, look, we're not ready to submit a proposal. That's fine. You won't be disadvantaged. You'll have exactly the same opportunity to submit a proposal next year. Similar question, is the three million for this call or spread across the 2020 and 2021 calls? Again, there's going to be, assume there's going to be three million per year for new proposals in addition to funding the existing proposals that are multi-year. Will the selection criteria made available in draft as early as possible to enable reflection, assessment and feedback? Yes, and they have been already. So as I indicated, the PDF document that's available on the ARDC website linked from the platforms page has a set of selection criteria already. The criteria are not yet weighted, but we've indicated where the selection criteria, where we have a preference for more of this kind of thing and less of that kind of thing. People are welcome to provide us feedback on those selection criteria if they want. Question about whether the three million includes compute in kind or is solely for funding people? The three million, again, it's highly unlikely that anyone proposal would get all of that money, but the funding or the investment that ARDC is making available can be spent on a variety of things. It could be used to purchase compute, access to compute. It could be used for people. It could be used for a range of other things. I would, however, say that the ARDC is separately investing in storage and compute. And so there would need to be a compelling argument as to why these platforms investments couldn't use the storage and compute that we're already investing in separately. So that would need to be a well-thought-through argument if people are proposing that the stuff that we already make available is not appropriate. A question about whether a CRC can lead a bit. As I said earlier, we need to be able to sign a contract with someone. So I guess in theory you can have a CRC leading a bid and let's say the university associated with that CRC as the contract entity, but we have to be able to sign a contract with a legal entity. And many CRCs are not necessarily legal entities. A question about how we're going to look at the progress of projects. So will the funded projects have milestones and interim reporting answer? Yes. What process will be used to measure whether an investment was successful? We will be encouraging projects to have measurable KPIs and reporting against those KPIs. Now, in the case of a transformational investment like some of these platforms investments are going to be, it's a little bit harder to define what the KPIs are, but we will be strongly encouraging projects, successful projects to come up with measurable KPIs so that we can assess their success. A question about the line between re-engineering something and building a new platform. I guess for me it's whether it's building something where the result is significantly different. Sounds like a build activity. Re-engineering something so that what you end up with is broadly similar, but built on much better foundations. Sounds like re-engineering. It's another one of those, it depends, questions. And so we'd be very happy to have conversations about what is proposed and whether that looks like re-engineering or a build exercise. Question about the existing virtual laboratories. So the question is, okay, people who are parties who are interested in joining or adapting a specific virtual lab under one of these calls have no assurance that the lab might exist into the future? Yes, that's correct. ARDC is making no commitment to ongoing investment for the existing VLs beyond the current round of extension money, which is the second lot of extension money that we provided. So the platform's investment that's being described here is explicitly designed as a new investment vehicle that in part is intended to attract a new range of entrants. Now it's absolutely the case that existing VLs can put forward a platform's proposal. As I said earlier, they're neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in doing so. But we can't make a commitment that an existing VL will necessarily be around past the end of this year. They may well be around anyway because they have found other sources of ongoing investment to keep them alive and healthy. But ARDC is not making a commitment to ensure that existing VLs are around past the end of this year. Question about sources of co-funding. Is there any restriction on sources of co-funding? Can it come from state or federal grants or international grants? At the moment, we do not envisage any restrictions on co-investment. In fact, again, I'm just making yourself off the top of my head now, but I would have thought the broader the sources of co-investment are better. And in fact, that looks like a vote of confidence in the future of the platform with their broader sources of co-investment. Question about the staging of the funding. Does a project ask for all of the funds up front or do they tap into the new funding made available each year? If a project, we probably, we probably need to add something to the frequently asked questions file to document this more carefully. But let's say, hypothetically, that a project was getting half a million dollars... This is hypothetical now. Half a million dollars per year of ARDC investment over four years. I imagine that we would be making those payments based on achievement of milestones. I don't think we'd be providing to be then up front and saying, here you are, knock yourselves out. So that would be provided based on hitting payment milestones. But again, let me try and be clear. There will be an ongoing stream of investment for existing projects each year, as well as new injections of funding for new projects that start that year. So you can think of it as a bit like a pyramid. We'll try and come up with a way of graphically representing that. So it's clearer. Are there other conditions around the co-investment? Can it be sourced from another Encriss organisation? In general, I believe the government is not why I would about Encriss facilities giving money to other Encriss facilities to do stuff. However, this is not a transfer of money from one Encriss facility to another. It's a co-investment by one Encriss facility in another, well, in something that's being funded by another. My suspicion is that that particular use case is okay, but I would like to check that with my CEO before rolling on that one, absolutely. Kerry, if you could just make a note of that, please. What do we expect will happen to the platforms after this four-year funding period? What will platform longevity look like? One of the things, one of the criteria that we're going to be using as a selection criterion is your sustainability answer. We're going to be looking quite hard at how the proposals describe their sustainability model. And if the sustainability model is ARDC funds them forever, they will get ranked lower than something that has a more distributed sustainability model. Let me put it like that. Another question about co-investments from international partners, yes, that's fine, as I think I answered earlier. Question about collaboration. And it's actually a good question, and I'll read it out in full. If we're collaborating across various organizations in developing a data platform, we'll need to spend some time in setting up rules, standards, protocols for data management. This is expected to take time and effort. Would this be included as part of a funded project? Answer, absolutely. Getting agreement about how to do things across multiple communities or indeed a distributed community is absolutely part of the work required to deliver a successful platform. And so, yes, we would absolutely see that as a fundable activity, and in fact, almost necessary activity if I can put on in those terms. Question about whether there's a limit on the number of EOIs that we can put in. Given the person is asking this question, I'm reluctant to challenge their creativity, but the answer is no. So people can put in multiple EOIs. That was the thing that triggered the question earlier that I can come back to. There is a requirement in the process we're running that you can only submit an RFP if you've submitted an EOI. That is, you cannot choose to keep your fantastic idea close to your chest until the last minute, and then say, here's an RFP, surprise. You have to submit an EOI to enable people to see it and collaborate around it before submitting an RFP. Again, we're going to have to document this in the FAQ so that it's as crystal clear as I can be. Is it the case that this 2019 funding call has $12 million of funding over four years? Yes, and there will be additional funding for the 2020 call and additional funding for the 2021 call beyond that. Scrolling interface in GoToWebinar is so optimal. Yes, I've already done that. Are scoping activities in scope for these calls? I.e. Can you request resources to understand what platforms are best to adopt, adapt? That is a great question. Thank you to the person who asked that. One of the things that the IRDC is planning to do between this call and the call in 2020 is a deliberate process of community development and facilitation to make underrepresented communities available, sorry, aware of the platforms technologies that are available to them. So the kind of scoping activity that you're describing is the kind of thing that we would be hoping to support in other ways so that people who haven't yet been involved in the existing data-enhanced virtual laboratories are able to be in a stronger position as possible to put in a proposal next year. We weren't able to do that ahead of this call, but we are aware that it's a real issue and we want to do some very intentional work to upskill the Australian research community on what platforms are available and what they would make possible so that people are better able to put in proposals for next year. Question about whether the IRDC is intending to be involved with hosting these platforms or providing infrastructure. So as I said earlier, the IRDC has a separate RFP process currently underway, documentation on their website to refresh the existing storage and compute infrastructure that Nectar and RDS, Blessed Memory, invested in. Our expectation would be that that is the infrastructure that we're already investing in that would be available for these platforms to use. Question not about the largest project, so moving away from the $3 million per project, brackets are highly unlikely to get funded, don't do it, close brackets. To the smallest project, plenty of projects that are run by volunteers that could do with some national recognition but can't start up co-investment. That's a very good point and in fact that's one of the reasons why we moved away from having fixed size projects because we recognise that some of the, if we'd said no projects smaller than $300,000, i.e. with an additional $300,000 co-investment per year, that would be very difficult for people. I haven't got a view on what the smallest number would be. I would personally be fine with a $50,000 project and $50,000 co-investment. So the co-investment requirement is an absolute but small projects with a small amount of co-investment, from my point of view, as long as they get through all of the other selection criteria, they would not be disadvantaged just because they're small. I think this means how many projects will be invested in in each call and will they be funded at the same level each year? The answer to how many will be invested in each call will depend on how many we get because as I said earlier, they're not all going to be the same size. So it will absolutely depend on what the numbers are up to. We will have a set of selection criteria and we will use that to decide how many projects we invest in. The question about whether the amount invested in is the same each year is an interesting one. There's no reason why a project couldn't request more money in one year and less in the following years. I'd be surprised if any project did that and would make doing the forecasting a little bit messier for us but there's no reason why that's not possible. We just have to see whether it made sense in terms of the project. Someone asked me a repeat question where I wasn't clear enough the last time. Does the call support scoping exercises if the organisation doesn't clearly know what might be the best fit? In other words, does this call enable people to say I'd like to spend a year working out what I want? Answer, probably. Yeah, look probably. Put it up as an EOI and let's see what it looks like as an expression of interest. I think we'd be cautious about investing in too many of those but I'm not going to rule it out. So put it up as an EOI, it's a very lightweight thing and let's have a look at it and see. I'm not saying no and I'm not saying yes. Question about the storage and compute investments that I've pointed to a couple of times already. I actually haven't memorised the timeframes for storage and compute investment. Their process kicked off a little bit ahead of ours. I believe that it's proposing to resolve around roughly the same time. So if I would imagine that the outcomes of the storage and compute investment decisions will be made known before the end of the year, which is roughly when these will be announced. I guess the question is more around can I depend on those new things being in place? I think you can depend on refresh storage and compute being in place. That's an easy answer to give. How are the exact timeframes aligned? I'm sorry, I don't know. Question about data-focused activities. An activity to bring together new data that could then be accessed by a platform. I think my response to that, this is going to sound trivial and I don't mean it to be, but I think the focus of the platform's investment and the focus of the data and services investment is on data. Ideally it would be nice if those line up, and there may be potential to do a bit of data harmonisation and work as part of the platform's investment. I think the focus for the platform's investment has to be on the platform. There is another whole strategic theme around data and I think it would be better for the data-focused stuff to be funded there. Question about, ask me whether I can talk a bit more about the planned ADC investment in storage and compute. I'd really rather not. First of all, it's not my area. Ian Duncan and Paul Coddington are leading that. Secondly, there's a lot of information on the ADC website. If you go into the ADC website and search for storage and compute, you'll find more information. Then you know what to do with on that. I'd rather not talk about it for both of those reasons. Question about why there's no slide on the current draft selection criteria because I wanted to keep the slide short to allow maximum time for discussion and because the information is available on the website. Again, parenthetical comment, there is more information about all of this stuff on the website so I'd encourage you to look at that and we'll be progressively making more available over time. Question about how multiple one-year applications versus one single-year application fare. I'm not sure I understand the question. I think they're getting at how would we rank an investment, sorry, three single-year investments from one organisation versus one three-year investment. It depends on what they're proposing to do. Andrew, that question has been clarified. So it actually should read, it's been clarified about two questions down. It should read, how would multiple one-year applications versus one single multi-year? Single, okay, so that was the interpretation I had. Single multi-year, yeah. It would depend. It would absolutely depend on how those individual single-year projects fared against the selection criteria. And a related question is what's the impact or scope changes that will affect future years or yearly submissions that build on the past year's proposal but risk certainty or future funding? Four years is a long time. If an organisation wanted to propose a four-year project, I would expect that the scope of that project would change over time, simply because you would learn more by doing it. So I would not be constrained in submitting a multi-year project if you're worried about us saying, no, you said in year one you were going to do this, we're going to make you do it. That would be stupid. So we'd certainly encourage people to, if you've got something that makes sense as a multi-year project, submit it as a multi-year project and if the scope needs to change, we can have a conversation about that. A question about whether we have pointers to successful business models that don't involve ongoing grant funding. There's an entire OECD report that I helped write on sustainable models for data repositories. It's not for platforms. But I can certainly refer to that and we might provide some pointers on our website to documentation. Yeah, there's an entire one-hour talk that I could give on sustainability for these kinds of investments. The question about whether the ARDC wanted to invest in ongoing, forever, sustaining of platforms investments versus investing in new stuff was something that was put to the ARDC board and the board said that they were primarily interested in funding new activity with a small amount of ongoing funding for things once they've been developed, commissioned, put in place and by small they meant something like 10 or 20% of the operating costs. So it's not zero, but it's certainly not the full cost. Yes, there is in fact a diagram that shows the pyramid of funding to make it clearer. I think it's possibly even in one of the overview documents that we have available. Or if it's not, I'll make sure that it is because I do have that pyramid already. Have we got a definition for what's meant by a platform? I think the platforms, certainly the platform and software strategy overview has a definition and we can make sure that that's more highlighted on the ARDC website. Yes, a VL is absolutely a platform. Now I accept that platform as a word is overloaded. But yes, a VL is an e-research platform. So if you want to think of it as a VL, then that's fine, but there are e-research platforms that possibly are not VLs. A question about the feedback on the platform strategy to date. I think I've had feedback from four or five people. All of them are slightly distressingly male. But there we go. And one or two groups. As I think I've indicated to all of those people who've provided feedback, one of my jobs that I'll get to real soon now is putting up a web page with the feedback and our responses to feedback. But the timelines for the platform's open call are tight and taken priority in me scheduling my activity. A question about what happens if the data platform's going to be used for more than just research, i.e. public and commercial use. Is that okay? Yes, that's fine. One of the things Encriss likes to do is encourage greater commercial use of the research infrastructure. So that's not an issue. A question about what the funding can be used for. Can it be used for computing equipment? Probably not. Data storage hardware? Probably not. As I've said, we've already got investments that are supporting those. Stellaries, yes. Funding to buy cloud access for data from the compute. Probably not because the ADC is already investing in access to data storage and computing. We prefer you to use that other existing source of funding. If there's a compelling reason why that's not possible, then please come back to us. A question of clarification about the relationship between the timelines for this funding round and the timelines for the infrastructure funding round. How can we align our proposals if they're not necessarily aligned processes? They are parallel processes that are trying to achieve related but not necessarily identical aims. So the storage and computing investment has a particular set of things that's trying to do. The platform's investment has another set of things that's trying to do. Those two circles overlap, but they don't overlap completely. A question about what happens if you have a group that has a number of service ideas that are different but related. Would the ADC prefer to see multiple EOIs or enlarge one? I think I'd prefer to see multiple EOIs because then we have a number of places where we can see potential collaboration opportunities. But if the proposal would like to say I'm by the way, this is part of a set of things from the same group, then that's fine as well. A point with which I cannot agree too much, which is that sustainability of data should be paramount. Software is ephemeral and trying to get people to prove that they can keep it running as counterproductive. They are not so sure about. We should value standards of technologies. I agree the data is the investment that is going to last and the platforms will eventually go away. Having said that, the ARDC board has said that they are not interested in investing in stuff that's going to get thrown away. So we're not expecting the platforms to be used in 20 years in the same way that we expect the data to be used. But we would like the platforms investment to last a little bit longer than the duration of the project. Used by commercial entities for research, not for operations. Yes, thank you, that is a good clarification. So the question about used by commercial entities, yes, if it's research or search related purposes, not to cross subsidize their existing operational activity. I'm assuming this is a trick question to see if I'm still awake an hour into a webinar. Can I name five things in the humanities that constitute a platform? I can but I prefer not to for a variety of reasons. One of them is that the department is embarking on a scoping process to identify what the needs for humanities arts and social sciences might be in research in general, and I would rather not preempt the results of that process by saying we care about these type things. Having said that, my background is in the digital humanities, if people would like to put in an EOI for a digital humanities or indeed a social science related proposal, I'd be very happy to look at it. To be clear, I'm not saying that it's going to get advantage just because I have a digital humanities background, but I'm certainly open to the idea of people making those kinds of proposals. Question about whether we can subscribe to the EOI website to be informed about the EOIs as they come in and look for collaboration opportunities. We're investigating mechanisms for doing that. We can probably set up an RSS feed for changes, but at the moment the best we can commit to is just look at it every couple of times a week. We'll try and come up with a better alerting mechanism, but we're working with a WordPress site, which is a little bit more restricted than what it can do. All the WordPress people out there in the audience who are screaming at the immediate, of course, WordPress can do that. You just have to install these 55 plugins. Please let us know what the 55 plugins are and we'll see what we can do. Okay, and with perfect timing, the questions have come to an end at 130, which is the scheduled end time. Thank you for your interest in the platform's open call. Please feel free to communicate with us if those questions were not your questions or if your question didn't get answered. This webinar will be made available as a recording from the relevant section of the IRDC website, so you can go back and review that. Please have a look at the ELI submissions as they come in. Walk for opportunities to collaborate. Please feel free to contact me or Carrie if you have particular things you would like to discuss. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your interest in platforms and we look forward to hearing from you over the coming weeks. Thanks all.