RDA Announces New Group Category: Communities of Practice

In an effort to build discipline or domain specific communities, the RDA is pleased to announce a new category of groups within its organisation, Communities of Practice (CoP). Complementing the already existing RDA Working and Interest group categories, comprising members who are often representative of various areas, CoPs will provide the opportunity to investigate, discuss, coordinate and provide knowledge and skills within a specific discipline and/or research domain.

With a focus on specific discipline/research domains, each CoP will provide a further mechanism for members to become engaged and involved in the community, while also attracting new members and enhancing communications with those outside the RDA. By offering a forum to discuss data-related trends and challenges, CoP members will learn from individuals’ experiences and collaborate on implementing solutions. As the RDA has produced numerous Outputs relevant to many disciplines or domains, members within a CoP will bring insight on how best to apply them within the context of that area.

CoPs will support their respective communities through the following activities:

• Raising awareness about the importance of opening up access to data by research organisations and private stakeholders.
• Focusing attention on implementing good data management policies and RDA recommendations within institutions.
• Highlighting the need for tools and existing standards to facilitate FAIR data management, and identify existing RDA recommendations and outputs to be implemented or set up RDA Working groups to develop new solutions.
• Linking existing communities and initiatives and advocating good data management practices across the board.
• Offering insight into discipline/domain data challenges and solutions.
• Building discipline and research domain specific as well as domain agnostic social and technical bridges, with and across communities.
• Sharing domain and discipline specific practices with broader data practitioner communities.
• Fostering understanding of and access to RDA for new members from discipline and domain specific communities.
• Collaborating and partnering with industry, associations, organisations and media.
• Pursuing discipline/domain-specific funding opportunities.

Although we don’t expect to officially launch the new CoP category until the first quarter of 2021, to find out more about CoPs, please read “A Framework for the Creation and Management of RDA Communities of Practice(CoPs)”, written by a dedicated CoP task force, a group comprised of members within the RDA community who joined together earlier this year to address the growing need for further structure to support the global RDA community. On behalf of all of RDA, I would like to sincerely thank Patricia R. Bello Bertin (RDA IGAD Co-Chair), Francoise Genova (ex-RDA TAB), Stefanie Kethers (RDA Secretariat), Dimitris Koureas (RDA TAB), Yolanda Meleco (RDA Secretariat), Cynthia Parr (RDA IGAD Co-Chair), Rainer Stotzka (ex-RDA TAB), Imma Subirats Coll (RDA IGAD Co-Chair), Bridget Walker (RDA Secretariat) for the time, efforts and commitment to the definition and scoping of this new and important activity within the Research Data Alliance.