Teaming up, with a little help

During the recent Teaming Up Across Domains event, TDCC-NES organised a project matchmaking session. This was an opportunity for our community to brainstorm project ideas and/or find others to join forces with, in the light of our currently open call for proposals, but also thinking about the needs of the NES community beyond that. 

After an introduction to the TDCC-NES roadmap challenges that projects need to address (FAIR data; sustainable software and e-science; connections to international activities; long-term data archiving; locating computing capacity close to the storage; human capital; cross-field collaborations), we presented what is expected from an hypothetical TDCC-NES project.

We discussed our approach to building collaborative, non-competitive projects, translating that into aspects of project design. Apart from a co-creative process in developing full project proposals, we see this taking shape through having several institutions involved in a single project and focusing on concrete outputs that will take the community forward. We encourage making use of international project outputs or knowledge relevant to a project’s topic, as well as making connections between disciplines. 

A visual with text, showing description of 2 project ideas. the 1st title reads FAIR 4 Chemistry, the 2nd reads Research Software Policy for NES in NL

The session continued with the pitches of project ideas, some received through our current open call and presented by the applicants (Sanli Faez, Serkan Girgin, Johan Hidding), others abstracted by TDCC-NES staff, based on known community input and needs. 

Project ideas that were discussed during the session covered a broad range of topics linked to our roadmap challenges - from developing discipline-specific training for data stewards to working on a template research software policy for NES institutions in the Netherlands, from making climate-science-related expertise findable and accessible to engaging closely with a newly formed Research Data Alliance Working Group, from making data more FAIR across the Chemistry discipline to writing self-reproducible papers. We even heard a spontaneous on-the-spot pitch from Yue Zhao, about a Partial Differential Equations (PDE) benchmarking platform, tied to SURF’s vision for the AI4Science platform.

Photo of session attendees, sitting around a table, engaged in a discussion
Photo of session attendees, sitting around a table, engaged in a discussion

Based on their interest, potential participation, expertise or similar, attendees were asked to choose a project idea to discuss in more detail within smaller groups. Worksheets with guiding questions were provided per each project. You can find more information on each project idea within the slides or the worksheets linked in the shared notes. The wrap-up demonstrated that project ideas were very engaging and useful for the NES community. Lead applicants found the group discussion to be a great opportunity to further develop the scope of their projects and even find interested partners. 

The comments received during the discussion of project ideas will be directly applied to project ideas selected to move forward (pending decision by the TDCC-NES Governing Board), and some forward-looking ideas will be taken into account in future developments of the TDCC-NES network and our roadmap update. 

Photo of session attendees, sitting around a table, engaged in a discussion
Photo of session attendees, sitting around a table, engaged in a discussion

If you wish you had been there and want to join us next time, you’ll have a chance on the 11th of June, when we will organise another project ideas matchmaking session in Utrecht. We will share more information on our website soon.

If you want to stay updated about TDCC-NES project ideas or other activities taking place across the network, sign up to our mailing list. 

Photo credit: L. Varat

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