This year’s NFDI4Ing conference has been organized in a joined effort by CC3 (TU Braunschweig) and CC4 (TU Dresden) which are responsible for the measures concerning “activation and collaboration” and “participation”. In accordance with the FAIR principles, the event was dedicated to sharing knowledge about RDM Best-Practices, Research Software, Infrastructure and Cooperation. In advance of the event we received close to 250 registrations for attending the two day conference. In the end 130 participants on the first day and 115 on day two joined our event. In total, the conference program consisted of up to 4 tracks offering 8 workshops and 29 talks through all four mentioned topics.
From a survey we have conducted after the conference, we know that 46% of the participants were especially interested in Best-Practices and 40% in the topic of Research Software Engineering (RSE). The RSE-track was organized in cooperation with the German Society for Research Software and also attracted speakers and participants from the international community. Hence we made sure to provide at least one continuous English spoken track throughout the whole conference.
Also part of the conference program was the election of the NFDI4Ing Community Award 2021. Participants were given the opportunity to elect their favorite RDM solutions from nine nominees.
From the feedback that we got from the survey at the end of the conference, we considered that the conference was all in all a success. However, we learned that we could still improve. E.g. many people have not been aware of the fact that, although the conference being free of charge, they still needed to register in order to attend and receive the necessary login information.
Also, attendees mentioned that the abstracts have been available on the website too late in advance of the actual conference. It would have been nice to record the sessions and to provide a possibility for the speakers to publish their work in conference proceedings could be taken into consideration to make the conferences contents available later on. With this in mind, we have published the “NFDI4Ing Conference 2021 - Collection of Abstracts” on Zenodo.
Another success was the announcement and the kick off meeting of the editorial board of the journal ing.grid. Ing.grid will be an open access journal for FAIR data management in engineering sciences. Its editorial board currently consists of 22 members from all over the world. The first call for papers is planned for the second quartal of 2022.
CC-41 had much contact with it’s community in 2021, as we strengthened and linked our network within and beyond germany. Therefore we are proud to announce the first CC-41 Community Meeting at March 3rd 2022! Right now we are expanding our line-up for the event to further spread RDM into the community. Several national and international speakers will take part in this event. Further information will drop later this month (December 2021), so stay tuned!
[Community Clusters has 7 items on its scientific dissemination list 2021]