TF-RED Home

Overview

TF-RED: Task Force on Research Engagement Development

TF-RED will formalize an existing collaboration of NRENs (and other research infrastructures) working together to develop methods for engaging researchers and collaborations nationally and internationally, through a set of reports, workshops, and best practices. The scope of the task force focuses on collaboration between the participating NRENs/research infrastructures, who then work within their own countries to engage their research support offices and collaborations. The TF aims to develop a framework for research engagement amongst the participating NREN community, and other research infrastructures. The results of the task force will yield documentation for other NRENs/research infrastructures to develop their own form of research engagement, which will benefit the various research domains across Europe (and beyond), and communicate and strengthen collaboration between/with other e-infrastructures/research infrastructures.

Aims

The task force aims to develop a framework for research engagement through a set of reports, workshops, and best practices to help participating NRENs support their research communities. This will result in:

1. Increasing our understanding of research workflows (beyond the “usual suspects” such as high-energy physics);
2. Gathering and sharing information, which can be used to improve network/research architecture and design;
3. Understanding what is important to researchers so that NRENs (and other infrastructures) can be more responsive to their needs;
4. Building a body of knowledge about research applications (for instance, as correlated to network utilization), which can be cited in interactions with larger community and policy efforts.

The task force is open to anyone to participate and we will seek collaboration with other infrastructures (such as Elixir, Clarin, EPOS, ELI, ESS, EUDAT, EGI, PRACE etc.), but also other projects (European Open Science Cloud) with respect to research engagement efforts as a framework is developed within the NREN community.
By-products of TF-RED will include:
- Supporting research collaborations that want to collaborate internationally;
- Establishing a continuous and permanent information flow between RENs and Science and Research communities;
- Coordinating reliable, predictable network behaviour in support of end-user (research) applications;
- Improving performance of network-centric and data-centric workflows.

The proposed achievements and KPIs for the first year (2017 - 2018) are summarized in the table below

Activity Classification	Work Items and Descriptions	Results or Deliverables	Report
Audience Definition and Scoping Phase (Activity Leader: Sylvia)	Define audiences for NREN/ICT/local research support offices perspective.	Internal documentation and scoping for TF collaborators and NREN community.	ONGOING
	Define research areas or communities (i.e., life sciences, climate, humanities, etc.) for TF collaborators. Extract from these defined areas research champions/advocates.	Create research advisory council for the TF from participating NREN countries.	ONGOING
	Communicate TF-RED initiatives to influential funders and/or research officials.		ONGOING
Investigation and Data Gathering Phase (Activity Leaders: David Salmon)	Select approx. 5 partner NRENs to participate in gathering network/organization-related data	Publish report sharing findings and result with the international community regarding RED.	ONGOING
	Create contact list of other infrastructures with brief description and collaboration opportunities	List of contacts	ONGOING
Analysis and Reporting Phase (Activity Leader: Chris Atherton, Sylvia as back-up)	Work with SIG Marcomms to define mechanisms to publish the outcomes from TF-RED.	Public website presence.	ONGOING
	Community presentations to research domain peers and NREN community presentations to share outcomes.	Workshop(s) and planned conference sessions (at DI4R, ISC, SC, ICT Open) with e-infrastructure collaborators on materials and issues ultimately increasing the value and face of R&E to other infrastructure resources.	ACHIEVED