The Research Data Alliance: Benefits and Challenges of Building a Community Organization

Abstract

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a community-driven organization dedicated to the development and use of technical, social, and community infrastructure promoting data sharing and data-driven exploration. RDA is particularly important for the global academic community where research infrastructure is often ad hoc, may have a short shelf-life, and hard to fund.At its launch in 2013, RDA struck a chord. Since then, RDA has attracted more than 9400 members from 130-plus countries and developed infrastructure used by groups all over the world. One of its founders is Francine Berman (FB), 2019–2020 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and the Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Berman served as co-chair of RDA’s leadership council and chair of the U.S. region of RDA (RDA/US) for the first 6 years of RDA’s growth. Her leadership and organizational experience in developing and operating national-scale cyberinfrastructure (she is former director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center) and her broad community contributions have helped drive the success of RDA.In this piece, Berman is interviewed by Mercè Crosas, Harvard University’s Research Data Officer with the Chief Information Officer’s leadership team and leader of Dataverse. Berman and Crosas met through RDA and both have deep knowledge of the benefits and challenges of running a community-focused organization. They share some of those insights in the conversation below. More information, including specifics on the RDA community and RDA’s ‘origin story,’ can be found here <https://www.rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/attachment/RDA%20RETROSPECTIVE%20FINAL%20-%20HDSR.pdf> .