Request for Comments: three important topics to give your feedback on

The RDA Subcommittee on Strategy has drafted papers on three very important topics related to the vision and future of RDA. Is RDA building an architecture? Is it a standardisation body? Should RDA be a training / education body?
The members of the subcommittee invite all RDA members to express your views on these papers and ensure that your vision and ideas for RDA are noted.

Building infrastructure through strategies of interconnection

RDA seeks to create a data infrastructure that enables researchers and innovators to easily share data across cultures, and technologies to address the grand challenges of society. This paper describes the approach of RDA’s work: consciously avoiding defining a specific a priori architecture or roadmap for interconnections, RDA encourages its members to propose topics as Working Groups & Interest Groups and to participate in existing Groups in their domains of interest & expertise.

Initial thoughts and recommendations on RDA as a Standardisation body

What is the relationship between the Recommendations produced and endorsed by RDA and actual Standards? The first four RDA Outputs have been recognised as ICT Technical Specifications, which is an important achievement as they are now endorsed standards and referenced in public procurement. This result has been strongly valued by the European Commission. This paper is an interesting overview of the pros and cons of systematically pushing RDA’s recommendations towards Standardisation. On the one hand adoption of recommendations by other recognised standards bodies would provide a quantifiable metric of RDA’s outputs and would increase trust and engagement in new user communities, while on the other hand the process may involve a lot of work and thus slow down the RDA process.

RDA as a training/education body? A certification body? Is there a mission/future here?

Training and dissemination of new skills is a key question to enable Open Data and Open Science. Thus the question of whether RDA should engage in training and curriculum certification is often asked. Communication and personal interactions play a central role in the RDA ecosystem: Forum and Groups discussions are the fundamental basis upon which all of the RDA ideas and solutions develop.
However education and training per se are not part of the RDA mandate.
RDA engages, on a limited, case by case level, in prototyping education and training practices, in particular in partnership with organisations which have a mandate in this domain. This is also in line with RDA aim to establish links with possible membership from less developed countries. The RDA will not operate schools and training programmes beyond this initial enabling phase of assessment and prototyping, but liaises with relevant organisations.