Breakout Discussion: Accelerating digital science#

Summary of discussions from the breakout rooms.#

The discussions were positive, people were energised by the recognition of the importance of TREs and the emerging priority of federation. Logically this made sense to attendees.

But federation is not the focus of TREs at present. The TREs are focussed on their own local problems: for example delivering siloed project specific facilities and data.

Another key theme is the focus on TRE costs, each looking to monetise their data to offset their operations costs. This is often part of TREs strategies. Such business models are not supporting a move towards federation and the separation of Data Zone and Research Zone.

The heterogeneous solution world causes complexity and as a result people cannot see how federation could work. The data is not standardised so how will that work? The systems are different technologies so how will they integrate? There is not a way of discovering data so who will be able to find and use it in a federated world?

In addition, the governance processes are different and not trusted between TREs. No TRE has enough trust in any other part to enable the connection of the entities delivering data zone facilities with each other let alone one delivering Research Zone facilities to researchers. The stakeholder space was very full, and no incentives for governance to become involved and change.

People could see all this complexity but felt they had no way of navigating it or seeing a way through. Many groups commented on how complicated a solution to this would have to be (which they could not see). Having a few projects to lead the way would be very helpful and help encourage the community that federation would come and be something to help make happen.