Facilitating the development of a diverse service landscape – Tasks and roles of Section Liaison Officers and Service Stewards within Base4NFDI

A group of innovative facilitators has started to support development of overarching services for research data management (RDM) in Germany. As part of Base4NFDI, Service Stewards and Section Liaison Officers support the integration of a hitherto rather diverse service landscape.

Since March 2023, the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), comprises the final 26 discipline-specific consortia. They cover a broad range of scientific disciplines, spanning all subject areas from the humanities and social sciences, to the engineering sciences and the life and natural sciences. The consortia are developing new or enhancing existing tools, services, and workflows to enable FAIR data sharing in their respective disciplines. They are also driving cultural change towards an open data culture. This will professionalize RDM in a very diverse landscape of technical and organizational solutions.

To support the development of missing links within an overarching NFDI portfolio, a joint initiative by all 26 NFDI consortia, Base4NFDI, supports the development of needed NFDI services, through a proposal-driven bottom-up process. These proposals are driven by the working groups within the NFDI Sections, where cross-cutting topics are addressed across the disciplinary boundaries of the consortia.

The Section Liaison Officers directly support the work of the Sections in matters directly related to preparing basic services development strategies, decisions and monitoring. Their central tasks include assistance with coordinating discussions on similar topics across Sections and monitoring needs for complementary activities and collaboration between working groups. But they also collect feedback from all stakeholders to further consolidate and continuously update the process model for basic service development based on NFDI and community requirements.

Additionally, a group of Service Stewards will ensure a smooth interplay between the sections, participating consortia and partner organizations involved in the development of a service.

They scout the infrastructure landscape across NFDI consortia with regard to potential service candidates and survey requirements of the researchers in the different domains. They support the rollout of services and the integration into the existing infrastructure landscapes of the consortia. They are critical to efficient adaptation of basic-services as the consortia will often need additional support for integrating a basic service with their existing service portfolio or do not have the resources and or expertise for adopting a new service.

Section Liaison Officers and Service Stewards work hand-in-hand to support consortia and sections within NFDI to foster the process of a basic service landscape created by a diverse scientific community from bottom-up.