Data for Sustainable Development (SD) and Responsible Research (RR)

The RDA for the SDGs IG has been an IG since RDA P16. Since then, there has been ongoing engagement with other RDA IGs and WGs, as well as the RDA Council to help align the activities of the RDA for SDGs IG group with the RDAs proposed strategy for 2020-2023. Most recently, the RDA for SDGs IG conducted a tentative mapping of RDA WGs, Outputs, Recommendations, and Adoption case studies to the 17 SDG goals, presented at RDA P18. Since P18, there has been ongoing development of the tool OntoSDG, and now our IG would like to gain more direct feedback from organizational and community members to evaluate this tool and mapping the alignment of RDA for the SDGs. Further, we will collaboratively develop strategic next steps to build upon and expand this current work to best frame the value of the RDA for the SDGs. Previous sessions have been well-attended, demonstrating the community interest and cross-sector data needs for the SDGs. 

The Data for Development IG has actually renewed its focus to incorporate more of capacity building and network for research in the South. It has built a sustainable collaboration in East Africa and Europe based on which a series of summer schools on survey methodology and research data management is organized. The Data for Development interest group focuses on closing the gaps in data inequality, by promoting activities for more access to and usage of data from a variety of sources of relevance to development studies, human rights, conflict research, and vulnerable and hidden populations. Whereas many intergovernmental organizations have a tradition of open data access routines and policies to data they have collected, data collected by non-governmental organizations are often not available for further usage. The Data for Development IG is involved in several initiatives to promote skills of early career researchers and support open and responsible research. These initiatives are empowered by the existing collaboration between institutions of the Data for Development members. These organizations include: Dlab – with a large data lab. In East Africa is just a kind of facility to support open and responsible research; EASRN – with members of 14 institutions in East Africa is a coordination effort for inter-university infrastructural development; NEMRA – with a membership of more than 300 researchers is collaborating to build; capacity of early career researchers; GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences – an international partner with renown experience in supporting open data science and repository management.

As outcomes, this session presentations seek to: collect critical support/collaboration and share successes and challenges of Sustainable Development (SD) and Responsible Research (RR) projects: potential user case examples will be: - the summer school involving East African groups and the East African Science Research Network; update on the development of the SDGs  - presentation by pilot test among IG groups; OntoSDG presents a semantic infrastructure for the representation of the UNSDGoals, targets, and indicators. OntoSDG enables interlinking the goals with respective projects, initiatives, labs, organizations, and researchers in any related domain that contributes to the UNSDGs.