2026-07-06
Time to connect! On June 9-10, 2026, the Base4NFDI Services Day took place in its second edition, this year in beautiful Bielefeld.
The Services Day has become a regularly organised event and support offer by Base4NFDI to the service development teams, where the teams get to meet each other, exchange on joint topics and enhance collaboration. The Base4NFDI staff prepared interactive formats like a barcamp and workshop sessons to inspire development ideas and enhance service quality but also to leave room to work on common challenges together.
On Tuesday, we started off with a workshop on community-building. After defining how we understand the term 'user community', we reflected on the individual service communities and how our teams already engage with them. We then discussed well-proven success factors for keeping the community momentum ongoing, assessed how the services already incorporate them and brainstormed ideas for next steps. These ideas will be put into practice in the Base4NFDI's ongoing User Engagement Task Force as we know: no matter how much potential a new service has, it is only as good as the number of people using it!
In a second workshop, we discussed harmonisation approaches for our incubator projects. Originally brougt up by the IAM4NFDI team, incubators are short-term collaborations (3-6 months) between a service team and a consortium (or one of their member institutions) that jointly tackle a specific integration challenge. Most of the teams offer regular incubator cycles in their Integration & Ramp-up phases - current open incubator calls can be found on the Base4NFDI website and individual service team websites. However, some common definitions and basic harmonisation on the approach are missing. In our workshop, we therefore discussed the term 'incubators' along with intended measures of integration and success. Also, a joint incubator dashboard for consortia to get informed on their involvement in each service was discussed as well as shared templates. For upcoming services, Base4NFDI is planning to prepare an incubator kit to support our teams and process harmonisation.
On Wednesday, the incubator session was continued in a second round - plus, we brainstormed on community stewardship and ideas for the regular Base4NFDI Service Teams Jour Fixe. Finally, we finished with a highly engaging and interactive barcamp where all participants were asked to bring up topics to jointly brainstorm or collect feedback on. We ended up with six sessions on important key future topics such as the EOSC node, NFDI after 2028, and the upcoming Interim report defence of Base4NFDI.
Luckily, we also had time for some fun during a joint dinner!
We are are grateful for the teams' engaging participation and are looking forward to our next Services Day.
