Community structure#

The community is currently entirely volunteer-driven, with no formally allocated time or resources for anyone. As the community grows and develops, we may need to think about more robust infrastructure concerning its operation and governance.

Currently, there are two main focuses of the community:

  1. Quarterly community events

  2. Community Working Groups

Quarterly Community Events#

These started with the inaugural community meeting at RSE Con 22 in September 2022. Subsequent meetings happen every quarter (usually March, June, September, December), with the September meeting being in-person or hybrid.

More detail on these events, and their write-ups, can be found in the events section

Working groups#

As well as hosting quarterly events, the community has established working groups to tackle key TRE issues collaboratively. These working groups are self organised, and aim to make progress on their respective focus areas between community events.

The current working groups are:

  • Citizen agency: documenting and outlining possible roles for the citizen within the data research arena

  • Community Management & Engagement: running this group effectively, and engaging all relevant stakeholders

  • Cybersecurity risk: explore issues related to the management and communication of cyber security related risks in TREs

  • Extending control: documenting and outlining possible ways in which data can be ‘shared’ across organisations

  • Funding & Sustainability: Exploring funding models and operation models to enable long-term sustainability and realisation of TRE infrastructure

  • SDE/TRE terminology: focused on clarifying the terms used WITHIN the UK TRE community

  • SATRE: community-run group managing the Standardised Architecture for Trusted Research Environments specification

  • TRE glossary: shared glossary across the TRE space to improve consistency of language, terminology and to document equivalencies of definitions and terms across organisations

Incubating working groups#

Several new working groups have been discussed by community members, but require more people to co-chair and set them up. If you are interested in these please get in touch, or post a message on Slack or the UK TRE mailing list.

  • Information Governance: Managing information governance requirements within TRE infrastructure, and moving towards standardisation

Previous working groups#

  • Open Source & Open Standards: Promoting open standards and open source TRE infrastructure. The main issues driving this working group have been included in SATRE.