Brief description
With over 10.000 members (50% from Europe) and 95+ working & interest groups (of which 25+ domain-specific), the Research Data Alliance (RDA - rd-alliance.org) is the strategic partner to represent the research data community for the European Research framework, and to achieve progress in thematic areas that need a global approach. RDA is bringing a number of contributions to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) in the form of services as well as technical resources, all openly available across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.
RDA Europe 4.0 is the European plug-in to RDA and is mandated to ensure that European political, research, industrial and digital infrastructure stakeholders are aware of, engaged with and actively involved in the global RDA activities. RDA Europe 4.0 supported growing the community of research data experts and practitioners by offering grants for early career researchers and experts, RDA ambassadors, and RDA output-adoption. In collaboration with a diverse range of national and regional stakeholders, the network of national nodes supported by RDA Europe 4.0 engage with research communities, support national agendas, contribute to the EU Open Science Strategy, and aim to increase the uptake of standards and participation in RDA globally.
Our role
Trust-IT Services brings its expertise, by leading the activities of Project coordination & Grant Management, European participation to RDA Global governance, Communication, Marketing, Impact & Sustainability. These activities, consists of:
1) Project coordination & Grant Management:
Trust-IT is in charge of the financial & technical & administrative coordination, including quality and innovation management controls with risk & contingency monitoring & execution.
Trust-IT also ensures efficient and streamlined management of the cascading grant process.
2) European participation to RDA Global governance:
Trust-IT offers support the RDA Secretariat for governance & group liaisons activities.
Via RDA Europe 4.0, it offers financial support to Council, OAB & TAB European members. Trust-IT supports the coordination and organisation of RDA Plenary meetings and is responsible for the overall organisation of Plenaries taking place in Europe. Trust-IT provides active support to the global communications, including maintenance & evolution of graphic design & branding.
3) Communication, Marketing, Impact & Sustainability:
Trust-IT defined & delivered the European a 27-month pragmatic and user-oriented communication & outreach strategy, building on an already consolidated stakeholder community.
Trust-IT worked to on-board new European members, additional national/regional nodes & new communities for RDA growth, adoption of results and sustainability of RDA in Europe.
As part of a comprehensive RDA Europe 4.0 sustainability strategy, considering support, node based, and global RDA activities, Trust-IT ensures coordinated synergies between RDA Europe 4.0 & RDA global with the most relevant EOSC actors.
4) RDA global platform & cascading grants platform
Trust-IT has designed, implemented, maintains and manages the Drupal based web platform focused on providing a set of collaborative tools meant to facilitate the work within more than 100 Working and Interest Groups via Drupal Organic Groups. The virtual working areas connect a specific group of users enabling knowledge exchange and collaboration via co-writing tools, mailing lists, file repository, catalogue, group calendar and web conferencing tools. The public website rd-alliance.org is also maintained by Trust-IT. The customisation of the Trust-It Cascading Grants Platform (https://grants.rd-alliance.org) supported the RDA Europe 4.0 grants proposal and evaluation process.
Onboarding your target communities to ensure uptake of research solutions requires a structured approach, deep analytical skills and the design and implementation of communication and engagement plans made up of a mix of techniques and tools.
If you need to identify and build the perfect audience for your research activity and boost your community, contact us, we’ll be happy to help.
