Event info
On the 1st and 2nd of April 2025, I attended the Fellowship of the Data event in Jena, Germany’s second national Research Data Management (RDM) community meeting. This is a community-driven event to bring together RDM professionals at various career stages. I went to present a poster on my research, “RDM, FAIR, and data sharing practices and perceptions of people who work with sensitive health data”.
Despite being a German meeting with most attendees from German research institutions, it was a surprisingly international community, with people from all over Europe and beyond! The event was full of community, interesting discussions, lots of Lord of the Rings memes, and as with many international meetings, I made new connections with UK colleagues I had not managed to meet in the UK.
Day 1
Day 1 kicked off with a lovely welcome from the organisers, and Benjamin Slowig gave an overview of the whole German RDM landscape. The first keynote was made up of 2 interesting talks; Britta Petersen (Kiel University), in a Matrix themed presentation, covered how learning objectives could be the foundation of future training for data stewards, and Mijke Jetten (Health-RI) gave examples of how the Netherlands are bringing together community, training and practice in FAIR data stewardship, including through networks like ELIXIR, and the Dutch Data Steward Interest Group.
After an all-important lunch break, the day continued with a session around diversity of RDM tasks and roles. Kevin Lindt (TU Ilmenau) and Stefan Kirsch (EAU Jena) took us on an entertaining Lord of the Rings-themed journey of their Rent a Data Steward initiative in Thuringia. Michael Feichtinger (University of Vienna) then walked us through building a data stewardship network and team in Vienna.
I and the other poster presenters for Day 1 then gave flash talks - a mini advert to pique people’s interest in our poster - before the full poster session with snacks. I had some fascinating conversations and made new connections with colleagues from NFDI4Health, Germany’s national research data infrastructure for personal health data.
The day ended with parallel sessions (Arts & Humanities, Life Sciences, and Data Competence Centres) where I got to know data stewards working in similar disciplines and had open, honest discussions on common issues we all faced. Again, building a supportive community was a key part of the event.
Day 2
In the morning of Day 2, I joined the community workshop session for data stewards to share essential tasks and how to overcome challenges. There were several ‘stations’ with different topics in the room which we rotated around every 15 minutes or so.
The third keynote of the event came from Antje Manske (GESIS/Base4NFDI) who explored how data stewards and other RDM professionals could use change management techniques to influence culture change at their institutions - inspiring to say the least!
Following another networking lunch, Samantha Pearman-Kanza (University of Southampton) gave the fourth keynote of the meeting, an in-depth talk on the ups and downs of using Electronic Research Notebooks. There was also a sneak peek into the new Careers and Skills for Data-Driven Research (CaSDaR) network she is leading, with some familiar faces appearing as co-leads, Simon Coles, James Baker, and the Software Sustainability Institute’s very own Director of Strategy, Simon Hettrick.
The final session of Day 2 was another poster flash talk and presentation session; most posters and presentations from the event are available on the Fellowship of the Data Zenodo page. Finally, the event closed with a summary from the wonderful organisers before we parted ways until next time.
Conclusions
A key theme and stand-out of the event was community and peer learning, which was really important and lovely to see. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and refreshingly open and honest. A lot of RDM professionals work in isolation or very small teams so meetings like this are vital to professionalising our roles and feeling connected and heard in an academic world that often sees RDM as an afterthought.
It was interesting how similar the RDM challenges in Germany are to the UK. I came away full of inspiration for both my SSI Fellowship and research, and feeling inspired to keep building connections and community internationally. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend a future iteration of this fantastic event!
Thank you to the Software Sustainability Institute for funding my travel and attendance at this meeting.