Funder Step: Building your community

STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT

Short description

In this service you are introduced to existing communities that are of interest for data stewards and researchers. For data stewards there are profession specific communities. Next to that there are communities for specific health-related domains. Furthermore, we give you a guideline on how to set up a new community or improve an existing community.

Why is it important

Research funding organisations, like ZonMw, recommend researchers and data stewards to collaborate and join or start a community within the research domain of their project. Their roles and expertise are complementary, as researchers provide knowledge about their research domain, while data stewards provide expertise on data FAIRification.

Such a community is fruitful to exchange knowledge and learn from each other, and to improve the interoperability of data within the domain by making joint decisions on FAIRification: writing FIPs, decide on controlled vocabularies and metadata schemas.

The role of a Data Steward

FAIR Data stewardship is a relatively new profession that emerged to support researchers in data handling before, during and after a research project. Data stewards are trained to make data more valuable by making them reusable for future research (and other purposes) after the project ends. They can also advise researchers on providing access to their data. Increasingly, data stewards introduce new practices to make data as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as possible. To get a general idea on the backgrounds and experiences of professionals working with FAIR in the health domain, visit the Health-RI Data champion portfolio.

However, because it is a new profession, there is no consensus on what exactly a data steward’s responsibilities and tasks are. Work has been initiated on a national level on defining the roles relevant for data stewardship, funded by ZonMw and co-funded by the National Programme Open Sciences (NPOS) and ELIXIR-NL. One of the concrete outcomes is the development of the NPOS/ELIXIR Data Stewardship Competency Framework.

Joining and forming communities is an important tool to strengthen the data steward profession by sharing experience and knowledge.

How to join an existing community

There are already active communities out there, some specifically for the profession of data steward and for a range of health-related domains. In the next sections we give you some examples of communities you could join.

Data Stewards and data management communities:

You can engage with your fellow data stewards via these communities:

• Data Stewardship Interest Group (DSIG): a domain agnostic, international community hub for data stewardship that enables informal and inclusive knowledge and experience exchange that meets online monthly. Their way of working is shared in detail in this article. Every two weeks, together with the TDCC (Thematic Digital competency centres), they “put the spotlight on” a data steward and other data professionals.

• Health-RI Data Stewards community (DSC): national community hub for health and life sciences data stewards that facilitates sharing experiences and collaboration. National community hub for health and life sciences data stewards that facilitates sharing experiences and collaboration.

More generic, data management-related, communities are:

• Research Data alliance (RDA) Europe

• Association for Clinical Data Management (ACDM)

• Institutional communities such as the Leiden University Research Data Management Community

Domain specific communities

In health research and innovation, many researchers and data professionals from specific domains come together to share their experiences and collaborate, for instance by defining FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs) for the domain.

Here are a few examples of domain specific communities:

• Imaging Community

• Omics-NL community

• Personal Health Train – Distributed Learning Community

• Architecture & IT Community

• ELSI Community

• Biobank Community

Also, just ask around, your colleagues will possibly know of communities related to your research domain.

How to build a new or improve an existing community

For researchers who receive a research grant, it is recommended to join or start a project specific community involving both researchers with knowledge on the relevant research domain, and data stewards with FAIR data-expertise. An example of such a community is the “ZonMw COVID programme”: a data champions group consisting of the project’s PIs and data stewards. This community was facilitated by the Data Stewards Interest Group (DSIG) and GO FAIR Foundation. The community collaborated during the programme, shared experiences, learned from each other and used their joint knowledge to produce and use FAIR COVID data by bringing together their project metadata with domain specific machine actionable metadata schemes, exposed in the Health-RI portal.

If you want to build your own community of data stewards and researchers (for your new project) or improve an existing community, these are some good practices that we would like to highlight:

• Arrange for a communication and/or sharing platform (Slack, Teams, Github or a mailing list) for sharing information, contacting members of your community.

• Provide guidelines for how people can contribute to and interact within the community

• Have (online) regular meetings to inform each other. Make sure that the meeting has a clear purpose that is related to data FAIRification. More details on organising a meeting can be found in this part of the Turing Way Guide.

• Meet face to face when possible (as a special event) to get to know each other better

If you would like to dive deeper, the following resources will help you on your way:

Community Canvas:

Community Canvas is a framework that will help you build and run a community. It has three big sections which are equally important,

• Identity: Strong communities have a clear and explicit sense of who they are, why they exist and what they stand for.

• Experience: what does your community offer to its members (shared experiences and content, but also rituals, traditions, rules and roles)

• Structure: operational elements of running a community. These are often neglected, and consistency is key

A nice starting point is the Community Canvas “Minimal Viable community” sheet, which covers the most important questions for these sections .

The Turing way’s “Guide to planning a community”:

The Turing way is an open source, open collaboration, and community-driven project that aims to make data science accessible, comprehensible and effective for everyone. They have an extensive “Guide to planning a community” which provides a checklist with extensive additional information on how to run a collaborative project.

 Further reading

• Community Building for FAIR Data - Leiden community building workshop

• The CSCCE Community Participation Model – A framework to describe member engagement and information flow in STEM communities.

• Community building via the  Data Stewards Interest Group (DSIG)

• Engaging Researchers with Research Data Management: the cookbook

• Building community at scientific events.  

• Open Science Community Starter Kit

• Manifesto for community management by the CMC (Community Managers Club)

Authors / Contributors

• Jolanda Strubel

• Pauline L’Hénaff

• Fieke Schoots

• Margreet Bloemers

• Ellen Carbo

• Mijke Jetten

For questions about community building and professionalisation of data stewardship, contact Fieke Schoots at  fairservicedesk@health-ri.nl.