Your views on core federation services for a more joined-up national data research infrastructure

This final workshop in the series was on the topic of Core Federations Services (formerly advertised as ‘Digital Research Infrastructure’) and was attended by nearly 60 participants from a wide range of organisations, as well as several members of the public.

In the workshop, we explored the key findings from our initial Landscape Review (October 2021) and our first draft thoughts on recommendations for future DARE UK and wider sector activity. There were excellent discussions and debates in the breakout sessions with strongly contrasting views in several areas, which it will be important for the DARE UK programme to address.

The key areas covered in workshop discussions included:

• Do we need to develop reference architecture for trusted research environments (TREs)? There was general support with lots of discussion around the need to link to common approaches towards governance and processes.
• What should our strategy be around high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery? Some questioned the risk/cost trade off – is this really worth the investment? Whereas others saw this as a critical area. There was also great input around how to better utilise public cloud and federation, and governance was again seen as important.
• There were good discussions around the principles for developing core APIs (application programming interfaces). This workshop did not aim to look at the detail of the services, but there was general agreement that these needed to be community-led and under open source governance. It was agreed that they must also work for existing infrastructures.
• The final area of discussion was around use cases/driver projects. There was strong consensus for the need to ensure those identified cover both core and edge use cases. Concern was raised that with short projects, it will be difficult to agree access to cross-domain sensitive data.

Our draft recommendations, and a summary of your thoughts and feedback, are captured in the slide deck linked below. If you missed the workshop, you can also view the presentations and a recap of breakout room discussions in the recording below.

View the draft recommendations and your feedback

View the event recording:

You can also view the recaps of our other stakeholder workshops.