The vision

The Agricultural Research Federation (AgReFed) was enacted in 2019 by founding partners. Membership is voluntary and open to all. AgReFed’s vision is to “enable FAIR agricultural data to accelerate innovation and increase profitability and sustainability of Australian agriculture” through the creation of a unifying federation for the sharing of agriculture data amongst like-minded data provider communities.

The approach

AgReFed was conceived as a federated socio-technical system that enables participating organisations to collaborate to make their data Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) in a persistent sustainable manner, from trusted points of truth operated by them. The socio-technical system, based on co-operative like principles, is outlined in the Stewardship and Governance Framework (the Stewardship Framework). Its implementation aims to achieve:

• Bringing independent organisations together to make strategic and technical decisions about data sharing to meet identified user needs;
• Guiding agricultural data providers; and
• Implementation by data providers using common technical infrastructure.

AgReFed welcomes any agricultural data community that is willing to contribute their data products (dataset, data collection/s, data services) and accepts the responsibilities of membership and actively contributes to the Federation. AgReFed is a democratic organisation – the direction and decisions of AgReFed are controlled by members of the Federation Council who “steer” AgReFed’s strategic direction. Members are encouraged to be active participants to AgReFed and contribute to “rowing” at the community level that support AgReFed. AgReFed is inspired by Cooperative principles of public good, and a concern for the community. The AgReFed Community expect research to be conducted responsibly, ethically and with integrity as outlined in The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (the Code)

Community space resources

This space is a community resource for the management, sharing and re-use of AgReFed resources including

• Background documents
• Policies, processes, and role descriptions
• Outputs such as code or workflows and research

Re-use and feedback welcome

The AgReFed community welcomes the appropriate re-use of these resources by other data communities that share our aspirations for FAIR data through democratic community participation. Feedback on these documents and their adoption and adaption are also highly valued.