 So welcome to the ARDC Projects Exchange 2021, which has the theme collaboration for impact. So I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land that we're meeting on today and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging. So I'm at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, so I'm acknowledging and paying respect to the Turbull and Yagaro people. Today's session is the first of a series of sessions over the next week, where we'll be hearing from the project leads of ARDC co-investment partners for our national data assets and platforms programs. So it's a chance to hear about each other's projects and plans and an opportunity to better coordinate and connect on common challenges that might arise during the delivering of these projects over the next couple of years. So this session is the kickoff to kick off our exchange and our speakers are Rosie Hicks, who's our CEO, Andrew Trelaw, who's the director of platforms and software and Adrian Burton, who's the director of data policy and services at ARDC. And they are going to provide you with an overview of the ARDC's intent in developing these programs and orientation to the co-investment partnership and the way in which ARDC can add value to your projects. We're going to begin with Rosie and then we'll hear from Andrew and Adrian and a bit of time at Q&A at the end and I'm fully aware and we're all fully aware that it's a Friday afternoon, so we may not last the full hour. We'll see how we go. So over to you Rosie. Lovely, thanks very much Natasha and if any problems with the audio then sing out. So good afternoon everyone and lovely to see you here this afternoon and the next few moments I'm going to spend going over something that I am sure you're already familiar with, but I do think it helps set the scene for this afternoon, which is really taking us in much deeper to collaborative partnerships for impact. So first of all, as you know, ARDC was incorporated just in 2019 and building on the amazing foundations of ARDC, but it was a lot to bring together. And so we spent some time thinking about the purpose. Really simply, our purpose is to provide Australian researchers with competitive advantage through data. And how do we go about doing that? What's our mission? Well, we're accelerating research and innovation by driving excellence and I am now handing over to Andrew to continue. We're very focused on providing a competitive advantage through data and part of that is in fact a significant part of that is the need to make available high quality data assets and importantly make it possible for people to do things with those high quality data assets. So those of you that remember the 2016 roadmap, you may know that we're in the throes of starting out on the next roadmap, but for those of us that think of the roadmap and remember 2016, the 2016 roadmap had a significant emphasis on the importance of data. I'm hoping that they won't in 2021 say, yeah, we've got that all sorted, we can move on to other challenges because that is not true. There are significant data related challenges for us to tackle. And in terms of what we're doing and how we relate to that, we've got two programs of activity. So one is around creating a collection of high quality national data assets that can be used across disciplines to solve particular challenges. Adrian will talk more about those in a minute, but we are also interested in making it possible for people to do things with those data. And of course, as the data volumes increase, the need to use sophisticated tools and indeed sophisticated collaborative environments to work with that data becomes more and more important. One of the things that we've been emphasising increasingly over the life of the ARDC is the importance of fairness. And you'll hear and see the fair acronym cropping up in all sorts of places in ARDC's messaging, but we're particularly interested in the reuse of data and the reusability of data. And of course, the findability, the accessibility, the interoperability are all in service of the ultimate reusability and indeed reuse. And as you'll hear in a little while, we're interested in looking to expand out the idea of fair beyond just data. And I'll talk more about that in a minute. You'll have heard Rosie talk not about us at ARDC funding projects, but about us co-investing in projects. And that's something that I really want to emphasise today and hopefully something that you'll hear as a consistent messaging thread through the interactions you have with the ARDC. So we really don't want to be seen as a funder. We don't see ourselves as a funder. We very much see ourselves as co-investors in things that you care about and that we care about, and indeed that we believe Australia should care about. So we are consistently trying to talk about co-investment and the co-investment process and the co-investment message. Now, in the case of some of the programs that we invested in last year, we had, sorry, well, we invested in them last year. We ran the programs in 2019. We had quite strict requirements. Those of you that submitted proposals against the 2019 platform's open call will remember that we had a mandatory one-to-one or greater co-investment requirement. We did that for two reasons to be clear. One was this desire that we were seeing not just as funders, that we were seen as co-investors, but secondly, we believed then and still believe that if there are co-investors in the project, the projects are more likely to be sustained beyond the end of the initial injection of ARDC funding. So that's why we really pushed hard that one-to-one co-investment message in the 2019 open calls. In 2020, of course, 2020 you may remember was slightly different to 2019 for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons, of course, thanks COVID, was that the institutions that were often co-investors in our programs had significant financial headwinds. And as a result, we relaxed that one-to-one co-investment requirement. So those of you that applied for the national data assets program, for instance, will not have had a one-to-one co-investment requirement. But we still believe that co-investment is important. So the first message is co-investment is important. The second message is that we don't just see that what ARDC is bringing to the table is money. We also believe that we are there to contribute expertise and effort. So Rosie, I've rolled on past your stuff into my stuff if that's okay. So we very much believe that we have expertise and effort that we're able to contribute and that we want to contribute so that we want the projects to be seen as a co-creation process, something where we all have an investment in its success. I mentioned that we've been talking about ARDC's requirements around FAIR and we've been quite strong for a while on the importance of the data that is being brought together in the national data assets projects or indeed the data that is being produced out of the platforms that we're also investing in, that that data be FAIR. But we're also interested in exploring what FAIR might mean in other contexts. So we're in the process of working through with the platform's community what it might mean to have FAIR platforms. Now this is an extension to where FAIR came from. It's work that no one really else in the world is doing. We have international colleagues who are looking at that and saying that's an interesting idea. Let us know how it goes. So we're exploring the idea of how you might make e-research platforms more findable and accessible and interoperable and reusable and you will have heard in the introduction that I'm responsible for our DC's activities in platforms and software. We're also looking at what FAIR might mean for software but there we are contributing to international activity rather than leading it ourselves. So there is an international working group led through the research data alliance which is looking at what FAIR might mean for software called imaginatively FAIR for research software FAIR for RS. Tom Honeyman the software program lead is involved in a number of the task groups for that. It's been jointly led by RDA, GoFair and CoData and RISA the research software alliance. And if you're interested at all in what FAIR might mean for software I'd encourage you to have a look at that group. If you can't find information please ping me and I can send it to you. So you'll see this increasing emphasis on the importance of FAIR across all of the things that we're investing in and then lastly before I move on to programs specifically I should say that one of the things you'll see in the way we interact with you in your programs is we're very interested in governance. In fact in our all staff meeting yesterday we had a number of our staff who were getting extremely excited about governance. I think indeed one of the people who works for Adrian was almost going so far as to say governance was the most important thing we did. He's wrong but I applaud his useful enthusiasm but governance is certainly very critical and you'll see that we are very keen that the projects that we're all involved in has strong governance arrangements and that we are represented on those governance arrangements. So that's I think as much as I wanted to say on co-investment. Rosie was there anything you wanted to hammer home even further on that before I move on to the wonderful world of platforms? Thanks Andrew everyone I'm so sorry I had to step out mid sentence there but I'm assuming that Andrew has done a wonderful job of concluding with the CEO's comments and if I may take just a moment to say really that I think we're at an amazingly exciting time moving this massively increasing demand for the type of work you're doing really into the mainstream and it's a fabulous opportunity for us coming together to collaborate this afternoon. That was the thrust of it I'm sure Andrew conveyed that but I'm really looking forward to the rest of the Zoom the rest of the WebEx session. Yeah I would have it so hard we're just so used to thinking of Zoom but that's okay we'll mental flexibility Rosie. Okay so let me talk about platforms before I pass to Adrian to talk about national data assets. So platforms unfortunately is one of those overloaded words. Anita Cannon who I see on the call is responsible for the platforms activity at Monash University and they use platforms in a slightly different way to the way we use it. We're defining platforms here as a set of services so these are machine accessible services often that have associated data integration or service orchestration functions or connections to data resources where the goal is to enable researchers to carry out some of their research activities more easily. So you can think of them as an aggregation of tools and services to make life easier for researchers. This is of course in support of this overarching goal of giving Australian researchers this competitive advantage through data. The goal for the ARDC investment in platforms is we're really trying to enable transformative research so we're not just trying to do more of the same we want to enable researchers to transform how they work and then the two open calls that we've run with platforms we've emphasised transformations in the kind of research that could be done so enabling researchers to tackle problems that they couldn't tackle before and transformations in the speed of research that is enabling researchers to do things much more quickly an order of magnitude let's say than they could have before. We've got particular sub-goals we'd like more researchers in more disciplines to have access to these kinds of platforms so Nectar one of the predecessor organisations to ARDC invested in a particular set of platforms we've been seeking to broaden out the remit of platforms and make them available to a wider range of researchers and a wider range of disciplines and the platforms we invested in at the end of last year I think reflect that. But going back to this theme of sustainability that I picked up when I was talking about co-investment we'd also like the community of platforms developers and managers to be more sustainable so one of the thrusts that you'll see in what how we engage with our existing platforms projects is how do you build a sustainable community of people that share best practice that help one another to work more effectively that possibly even exchange developers if developers have particular skill sets so there's a very strong emphasis on that sustainability of the community. I note with some concern that Adrian has wandered off just at his point of the agenda Natasha would you like to tell us something about or possibly Adrian would you like to tell us something about the awesomeness that is the national data assets program. See the national data assets good thank yes the other wing of the current ARDC co-investments is the national data assets. It comes from an increase this is an increase you know ARDC is part of an increase and this is an increase program we are planning through this national data assets program to build nationally significant data assets that will support leading edge research so that's how it fits in as part of the increase principles and increase ethos in this area it just means that you know there are lots of data there's lots of data around there's lots of data assets around we particularly have partnered with the ones with that are complex national partnerships so that's that nationally significant thing because increase acknowledges the great role that local infrastructure and you know plays however it's our role to get involved in those national data assets that are inherently cross institution and cross jurisdiction and they are the ones actually that are quite complex and need quite a bit of support and the ARDC is a logical partner for them the program logic for the national data assets program is fairly simple the inputs I'll stack it across the as a program logic model that has input activity output outcome and impacts in general what we're the whole set of resources and expertise and existing assets come from both the ARDC and a set of partner organizations the activity then in general is to build that data infrastructure and importantly to populate it with real content that has been built on consensus and standards again both these activities are ARDC and you know the partner projects in collaboration working there the typical output we're looking from an for a national data assets project is that there is a new national data infrastructure and it is available it's important as we move on that the outcome actually refers back to the whole increased principle that this data infrastructure should be then used by Australian researchers for leading-edge research so it needs you know that's these outcomes sort of direct the priorities etc of the projects and the program and then the longer term impact is that you know this when this research is done with the new national data infrastructure that that research will bring you know economic and social and environmental benefits for Australia so that's the general program logic that sort of sets out you know how and how and what we're trying to achieve with this program I'll just move on seeing as a Natasha said the theme was Friday afternoon and let's get straight to the point we also so in general across all our programs so the platforms as well as the national data assets and everything we do there is an element of ARDC project support we've been informed by Bunnings where our project investment is just the beginning and at the beginning of a long-term partnership with the groups involved where we continue to provide a whole set of other value-add inputs to the projects I'll just go through some of them this is by no means exclusive where ARDC has underpinning operates underpinning infrastructure and facilitates infrastructure in the area of cloud and storage and we'll be in touch if your if your project is just beginning we'll be in touch to just sort of get an idea of what your technology requirements are and what they might be in these areas ARDC can help where you're not obliged to take our help in in any of these areas but we can help we do we can provide allocations of cloud and storage obviously it has to be suitable for what you need and from our side we have to be able to you know actually it must be feasible for us to provide that but we can look at specialist needs if necessary but that's that'll be a conversation between us and you there is a storage infrastructure thing now just bring your attention to you'll get more communications from us in the next little while but it is time sensitive the ARDC has just launched a stage two data retention program that is not targeted at projects like yours it's targeted at institutions and increased facilities however a good deal of you actually have you know some of your storage requirements would have been taken care of by Australian research institutions and increased facilities if that's the case I would get in touch with them and we'll give you the information you draw them draw their attention to this data attention program that we have and your collection could be included as part of an an institutional package that we would be developing with your institution or with an increased facility so just don't worry if you don't understand all of that but we will be in touch with the projects just to draw your attention to that and the idea is it's not direct support for your individual project but it is storage support that we can provide to an institution or a facility that might well be already interested in supporting you as far as storage is concerned we have a whole set of information services by which you can get access to persistent identifiers like DOIs and a whole range if you have physical samples in your projects we have identifiers that can be used for physical samples we have a lot of assistance in publishing metadata and syndicating the the descriptions of your data collections and other software items and other things and we have a whole set of information services around the publishing and reuse of specific scientific and research concepts so in standardized vocabularies again you'll see you'll hear more about this from us later but just to say that we have those services and all our projects are eligible to use those services and there is no charge for those we have also informatics expert support for all the above so if you didn't even understand what I was talking about a standardized vocabulary don't worry we actually have staff etc who can come into your project and look at it and say well maybe you could actually use that and if you're interested in any of those areas we have experts have been working in this for a number of years that can help the projects in those areas and more broadly and you know what it means to be fair you know what it is to do that kind of data management for findability accessibility interoperability and reuse we have experts on our team that can work with you we have other kinds of experts that are not in that kind of informatics and information sharing but right down at the systems development because almost all of your projects will be developing some kind of an IT system as a core and we have experts that can help in data systems architecture platforms architecture and analysis and support and again we'll be in touch and for example if you have a technical advisory group or team committee in your project we'd have someone who could sit there and as an observer and help as required we also Andrew talked about broader things that the that enable projects in general we call those sort of enabling frameworks that include governance and strategy agreements policy and we're developing that as a capability to support the projects and in everything that we do the last stop point is important I've talked about what we can do for the projects you know we are an amazing organization but we certainly don't have the answers to everything and a lot of the experts are right here on the call and so probably the major thing that we'll be able to do for your projects is this cross-project coordination and pollination we'll be starting up a number of working groups and other sort of clusters etc to share information across the projects so if you have any ideas in that area please so be proactive and sort of suggest to us what I try to get across today is that we are here to support and be part of the projects if there's things that you think you need then get in contact with your liaison and we'll try and develop that into the future so I think that was all from me do we hand back hand back to Natasha is that right yep that's right thank you Adrienne Andrew thank you Rosie great so a chance for you to ask questions there is a question there it's directed at Andrew but I think Adrienne may want to speak to that one as well what about it's from Steve McGeckin Steve you can unmute yourself if you'd like to add anything I just the question was about fair vocabularies and linking into the work that Simon Cox is doing on the 10 simple rules for fair vocabularies which is in pre-print at the moment it's actually a topic of discussion at the NISO conference this week which at a session which the ARDC ran with Simon actually but who would like to answer that where this where the fair vocabs fits in well Andrew introduced the fact that ARDC is interested in complying fair to a whole sort of other things so that's correct yes and and vocabularies as well so if you have a list of important concepts that are that the backbone of standardization for your data collection or or anything in your systems then this ARDC actually runs a service there that is meant to be able to make those standard concepts and standard lists findable accessible interoperable and reusable and yes we're working very very closely with Simon and with you Steve in that effort so yeah thanks for bringing that up that is a another important element of the fairness of everything. Brilliant thank you I am not seeing any other questions in the chat I can't see everybody if this is your chance to unmute and ask a question I'll just give you a little bit of time if anyone would like to. I can see Lujan from Black Mountain. Yes please go ahead. Hi yep I'm just sort of this is Lou from Atlas 3 Australia so I just have a general question instead of direct to anyone from ARDC's management that sort of wishes to address that I guess sort of the new kind of way to work with ARDC is to see ARDC as a co-investor not a grant agency right so you're really a partner of the project and so I guess sort of my question is how detailed would you like to be to be involved in the delivery of the project is because there can be for example you can you can either be sitting on the governor's body and be an sort of oversight of the whole thing to actually get to be part of the sort of decision-making in the day-to-day operations the project management right I guess I guess how detailed would you like to be to be involved in each of the project deliveries. Excellent question I'm going to go Rosie first as the highest ranking officer. Good call. Thanks for bringing up that question and Natasha thanks for giving me the answer to respond because I am going to respond at a higher level. ARDC has never been a funding agency there's just been issues around the way that projects have been selected from a highly competitive space but what makes the organisation and indeed other increased organisations so special is actually the staff the people the staff cohort and the expertise and so the fact that we hire people as Adrian said that are deep experts in all things fair just to take a simple snapshot there we don't hire them just to check reports and compliance so from that philosophical position we have a fantastic cohort of staff with deep knowledge in this space the only limit to participating in the projects is obviously bandwidth so we will do our best to contribute intellectually and deeply to the projects to the full extent of our resources going forward we're looking at how we adjust our own organisational model and increase our staff cohort to further deepen the collaborations that we have for each of the projects so I think what I'm giving is the deeply held belief and philosophy of how we would like to see ourselves in this conversation. Great thank you Rosie and thank you thank you Rosie that's great sorry a bit of a lag time there Andrew you want to add something to that yeah and if I can perhaps provide a specific example that is of course completely consistent with what Rosie has just said for the platforms projects one of the things that we have been offering to the platforms projects both the 2019 and the 2020 open calls is some expertise housed in Adrian's group and indeed housed within the person of John Smalley in Adrian's group so he came to us with significant expertise around architecture and design of large data systems and we have been effectively lending him out to the platforms projects initially to do a a kind of an overview of their technical architectures and the technical approaches they were taking looking at it and saying well okay I noticed you're using this approach had you thought about doing things this way or were you aware that there were later versions of this particular solution that interoperate in these ways and of course as he did more of those he was starting he was able to identify points of intersection and points of collaboration between those projects are you're trying to solve this particular problem that project over there is also trying to solve that problem you should talk to them so that's if you like at one level but in the case of one of our platforms projects the eco commons platforms project he's actually really rolled his sleeves up and got involved in a very detailed architecture review that they were undertaking and has been very much a co-creator of their new architecture now obviously that's to go back to Rosie's point about bandwidth and resource that's a significant involvement and we probably don't have the ability for John to do all of those unless Adrian's secret plan to clone him is going to pay off faster than we thought but that's the that's an instance of the sort of deep engagement that we are prepared to make where it's going to demonstrate real benefit thank you Andrew I think that's really clear answers and thank you Rosie as well that's great thank you for that question Lugina I think a lot of people may have had that question in mind as well okay so there's a question from Ivan Hanigan and he is asking he's interested in your views of the major impacts the COVID pandemic will have for data science and research so for human health and social science there are now new ways to collect data on individual home locations and travel movements or will Australians be more likely to allow private data to be used to support policy research and policy that's in line for disaster preparedness if so what are the implications for our data security systems wow that's a big that is the topic of a webinar who would like to start with the presentation Andrew jump in so I'm cautiously encouraged that 85 percent of Australians are now prepared to have a an anti-COVID vaccine which suggests a degree of openness to moving outside the comfort zone that may not have been around last year the issue of private data and the issue of data security and indeed the issue of how we work with sensitive data is one that's come up over and again Adrienne has in his team a guy called Kristen Kang who's particularly focused on the challenges around sensitive data but I was wondering whether Steve McKekin would like to briefly talk about the one with the five safes approach which is being explored in the cadre project um sure uh when we start well I mean if we're talking about data security and private data you know five safes is where I naturally go to yeah and I think that's probably the model we probably want to think about so for those folks who aren't aware there's the um the five safe model says you know how do you think about safety of people projects data settings and outputs and how we might understand and monitor them so the cadre project we're working on how you might both describe those and incorporate those into some of the data access environments that you might use um the interesting question that Ivan puts is I think actually oriented around do people trust us to use the data uh effectively um and I would say I'm I mean kind of put a counterpoint on um we're doing some work in the center right now which is dealing with hesitancy to vaccinate so so for those who are interested in reading it's actually gone down the number of people who think they will vaccinate rather than up which is a little depressing but yeah but the point there I think about think you know sort of the I think the interesting question here will be the extent to which people are what COVID might tell people about sort of the value of data in actually be able to support um uh some of the you know the research that we need to do to you know keep everyone healthy and then and say contribute to that effort I think that's quite an interesting sort of framework question that um that might guide some of our thinking so that it say there's some there's actually some quite interesting research to be done on willingness to participate in such programs um there's one of these called a cross cutting exercises um that that might be of interest um actually do people you know how have people changed their views from 2016 when we had census fail to now when you know we can see the gains of possibly doing the sharing that's there I just had um questions about you know whether the COVID pandemic will you know perhaps provide some opportunities I have heard experienced people say that you should never let a good disaster go never let never let a good crisis go to waste was Winston Church as long yeah that's right so unexploited for strategic reasons so um and the Christ Church I know that there's someone did an actual study of the Christ Church earthquake disaster that actually ended up having long term uh data sharing uh improvements for the in that area there uh so uh you'd hope that that would be the case and so I think people would be certainly more open and expect science to to have a role in in in supporting that I think this group here that's on the call today actually have a the corresponding role to say yes and you can trust us to do it and the kind of systems that you guys are going to be building through these programs are the ones that can say yes and they've got procedures and they've got the systems and they've they've got our interest in heart and those the uh the interests of the public are reflected in these uh systems and you know that that will be a big part of uh I think there will be an openness and so we've got a an opportunity to show that we can respond to that great thank you there's a couple of follow-up comments from Ivan there in the chat if you'd like to read them um Natasha uh on the bushfire one it might be worth Adrienne very quickly talking about the translational research data challenge yes which one's this the uh smoke thing is that right this one yes yeah Ivan's involved in that uh oh okay bushfire research data challenge but uh in parallel to this the group of people are on the call today we have another set of a different program where we're starting with the problem of bushfires and then asking the question okay what kind of platforms and data and other things would be required for for that and the work that Ivan's already preparing around uh air quality in this program we're taking almost as a given and an input into that program we're seeing how we can great thank you Adrienne um so there's a question there from Hugh um Hugh I'm not sure if you'd like to unmute and ask that question yourself or if you'd like me to to ask it I'll just give you a minute if you'd like to ask it yourself otherwise I will oh okay so he is interested in the working groups oh sorry go ahead didn't give you long enough sorry oh okay I just want to know um who to ask um or who to suggest uh creating you know the creation of a working group who where would I start if I wanted to create a working group across across these ARDC people terrific yes um question was addressed to me I can tell you that the right person to talk to is Natasha who's right there and if she'd like to say anything further and over to uh yeah thanks for the question Hugh so we are hoping that through this uh initial kickoff week with the projects exchange that we will start to see some of those common challenges and um then from that we can actually look at what interest groups we currently have uh whether we need some subgroups to those for example we have a sensitive data community of practice but perhaps we actually need a specific subset on health data or you know we'll see what actually shakes out from the projects exchange but we already have a number of communities of practice that we facilitate in ARDC that are part of the broader community looking at particular challenges in the data space which a lot of these projects will have a link into so I think we'll we will explore that a bit more through the projects exchange through the discussion there and also following that probably about six weeks down the track or so we'd like to do a bit of an orientation to the ARDC data services and expertise and how you can hook into that so we'll fold it into that discussion as well but if you have thoughts you have a program manager that you can get in touch with and we'll also make sure that that information is flowing out to you of what's currently available and how you can hook into those great thank you Hugh um I do not see any other questions and we are just coming up towards quarter two so I think we actually might close it off and thank you all very very much for giving up your time on a Friday afternoon to come and thank you to Rosie Adrienne and Andrew for that excellent information about the ARDC co-investment and what it will mean for your projects so as I mentioned we're kicking off this the first of the project exchange meetings we have a number of them via zoom one hour sessions next week where we'll hear from each of the project leads what's happening in their projects we'll start to look at some of those common challenges in the discussion and as I mentioned a little bit further down the track we'll look at some specific sessions on how you can hook into the ARDC services infrastructure and expertise so thank you all again have a lovely weekend and bye all