Data stewards, let's share: Essential tasks and how to overcome challenges

This is a set of documents used and gathered in a workshop conducted by the Data Stewardship goes Germany (DSgG) community on the second conference day of the Fellowship of the Data - International RDM Community Meeting in Jena on April 1st&2nd 2025.

It consists of

1. the presentation slides that have been used as a short introduction and a frame for the workshop
2. the documentation of the results from the group work conducted in a "world café" format

The world café has been featuring three sessions on the main topics that are currently also adressed in the respective working groups within the DSgG community: "Vision", "Yellow pages and communication (channels)" and "Challenges of Data Stewardship". 

The workshop was held unter the title:

Data stewards, let's share: Essential tasks and how to overcome challenges

Data stewardship is a systematic, scientific way of stewarding research data while at the same time ensuring its integrity, accessibility, meaning and usefulness. The emerging role of data steward has become increasingly important for the management of research data (RDM) in the scientific disciplines and large research projects such as Collaborative Research Centres and Clusters of Excellence, in the NFDI consortia, as well as in small research groups and in infrastructure institutions such as libraries and computing centres. 

However, a clear definition of a data steward remains unclear, as their responsibilities as we all know are diverse. Therefore, data stewards often specialise in particular aspects of RDM, depending on the specific needs of their discipline, project or institutional setting. 

The DataStew project has identified five prototypical profiles for data stewards, characterised by their competencies, tasks, institutional location, and professional and RDM background. 

In this workshop, together with the participants, we want to bring to life the range of tasks performed by data stewards, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and to discuss the challenges that arise from the diversity of tasks and the opportunities to address them.

We will start with a lightning talk about the emerging data steward community in Germany based on the activities of Data Stewardship goes Germany (DSgG), followed by group work and plenary discussion.