RDA Global Adoption Week 2020 insights

In 5 consecutive days, 10 webinars, 33 speakers from all regions, 19 outputs highlighted and 13 adoption stories told. 

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) adoption session, originally planned for Plenary 15, turned into a global adoption week scheduled from 15 to 19 June 2020. The aim remains to demonstrate the wide variety of adoptable and adopted solutions to data sharing challenges that people in the field encounter in their daily jobs. Daily webinars provided an opportunity to learn about RDA Outputs and engage with speakers from all around the world who created and implemented them in their organisations. Presentations were organised around five themes from the research data lifecycle, as used in the RDA Recommendations and Outputs catalogue. 

Insights from the audience

The Global Adoption Week 2020 provided a virtual stage through 10 webinars for 33 speakers from all regions, 19 outputs highlighted and 13 adoption stories told. 968 people expressed interest in attending the sessions, and 545 people from all over the globe attended. To foster engagement and get an understanding of the backgrounds and needs in terms of Research Data Management of the people attending the sessions, RDA opened every session with asking attendees a few questions to break the ice, and understand who RDA chairs and adopters were engaging with. Below there is an overview in numbers of those people who answered the engagement questions, which focused on their primary roles, discipline backgrounds, country of residence and what they were hoping to learn from the sessions. 
 

Topics related to RDA outputs that attendees wanted to learn more about during the global adoption week 2020 are represented in this word cloud: 
 

What did the RDA community say?

Attendees, when asked about the main benefit of attending the RDA Global Adoption Week 2020, mentioned that they were hoping  to “find the state of the art”, to “I [learn] more about two recommendations I was interested in” and to “[access] information in a synthetic form that otherwise I would not have been searching actively”.

Among main takeaways, attendees mentioned “there's a lot of successful adoption cases out there!” and “that shows the diversity of activities”. One attendee recommended that RDA could use “more visualisation/navigation tools across RDA groups to extract better useful content for diverse stakeholders” and that “a database of institutions who adopt one or another RDA recommendations would be useful”.
 
One attendee mentioned “concentrating this to one week made it a bit too intense for me; I would have liked to attend more sessions "live" but this wasn't possible because of other commitments. I would spread it out over two weeks. As a point of improvement and “Differentiate what is really "adoption story" from "sharing experience" as both were indicated as useful”. 
 

Did you miss the RDA Global adoption week?

All slides and recordings are now available for you here, and on the RDA Youtube channel. 
The RDA secretariat is working on extracting each adoption presented during the RDA Global Adoption Week 2020 and adding them to the growing list of inspiring adoption stories.

Did you adopt an RDA output or recommendation? Help us inspire further uptake. Submit your story here.