On 25 September 2023, the DICE Project had its final review. In the report issued by the reviewers appointed by the European Commission, it was stated that the “… project has delivered exceptional results with significant immediate or potential impact”.
The DICE (Data Infrastructure Capacity for EOSC) Project ran from 1 January 2021 through 30 June 2023. Its goal was to promote the uptake of data management services within the EOSC ecosystem, offering free use of services within the scope of the project to qualified recipients. As the review report states, “… the project has successfully implemented and delivered a variety of exploitable results, including the integration of data management services with EOSC Core, integrated community platforms that execute use cases based on the data management services of the project, service management processes for the DICE data management services, training materials and more.” Furthermore, “… the services have been used by more than 2500 users in the scope of over 200 service requests from many different EU countries. Service usage has met and/or exceeded the expectations …”.
Trust-IT was responsible for communication, dissemination, and outreach, during an especially difficult time that spanned the entire period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are proud to have contributed to the successful uptake of the DICE services through flexible management of the opportunities for outreach despite the challenges of the pandemic, a contribution that was explicitly acknowledged by the reviewers.
Now the post-DICE torch is being passed to EUDAT, where Trust-IT coordinates the outreach and communication activities and is contributing to the promotion and sustainability of several of DICE’s data management services for the entire EOSC community.