2026-09-22

Over the past few months, we’ve shown you that our basic services are doing a great deal to engage with their users and respond to their needs. But it’s not just the services – Base4NFDI is also making a real effort to work closely with its community. In September, we’ve informed about a few of our community events and how we’re staying in touch with our community.

Base4NFDI User Engagement

User engagement is a central element of Base4NFDI. As the basic services supported by Base4NFDI cover a broad range of technologies and areas of research data management, they address very different users. While some services primarily target researchers, others are particularly relevant for infrastructure providers and organisations. This diversity is reflected in the ways in which users and communities are involved in the development of basic services.

The main community of Base4NFDI is formed by the NFDI Sections, NFDI consortia, and their affiliated institutions. Due to the processes of Base4NFDI, the Sections play an important role in identifying cross-consortial needs and bringing together perspectives from different disciplines, while the consortia contribute their domain-specific expertise and requirements. Via the consortia, a wide range of stakeholders, such as service providers, technical staff, and experts involved in research data management and digital infrastructures are considered as users of basic services. 

At the same time, Base4NFDI's user engagement extends beyond the NFDI community. The broader scientific community is an important target group, as basic services are intended to provide value across disciplinary boundaries and support researchers and research-support professionals beyond the NFDI structures. Base4NFDI also engages with expert communities and international initiatives, including well-established initiatives like the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). These connections help to exchange expertise, identify emerging requirements, and ensure that the services developed within Base4NFDI are aligned with developments in the wider research infrastructure landscape.

Strategic Task Force User Engagement

Given such a large community and the diversity of user groups, Base4NFDI faces the challenge of identifying all needs and taking them into account whilst also providing information and materials tailored for the whole community. Therefore, the Strategic Task Force (STF) User Engagement was established in spring 2025, including a few members from all task areas and service stewards.

The overarching goal of the STF User Engagement is to facilitate and support activities that foster the adoption of basic services. The group oversees all activities of Base4NFDI related to forms of user engagement as well as integration and adoption of the basic services. For Base4NFDI, user engagement means ensuring that potential users know about the services, understand their added value, and find the services usable for their needs. This includes supporting a user-centric approach to service design and development, as well as communication and engagement activities that connect the services with their intended communities.

Integration focuses on making a service available from both a technical and an organisational perspective. This means not only ensuring that the necessary technical interfaces and infrastructure are in place, but also addressing the organisational conditions required for a service to become part of existing structures and practices.

Ultimately, adoption goes beyond availability or awareness. It refers to the actual use of a service and the continued support and development of that service within its community. Adoption can take different forms, including piloting a service, co-development with users, advancing an existing service, integrating it into established workflows, or providing training and other activities that enable users to make effective use of the service.
The STF explained in one poster.  

You may not know this, but the STF User Engagement isn’t the only Base4NFDI STF: Our project has evolved beyond fixed task areas to work through cross-cutting strategic tasks. If you want to know more about the respective Task Forces, have a look here.  

Events for different target groups and user

Rather than creating entirely new channels for reaching communities, Base4NFDI builds on existing structures and networks, such as the NFDI Sections, consortia, and community events like CoRDI to connect services with their potential users. But the project has also some very own community-tailored events to offer. There are currently two series of events taking place:

> Base4NFDI Demo Sessions 2026

These sessions showcase our basic services live, giving a hands‑on view of specific tools, highlighting practical workflows, and allowing direct interaction with the developers. Recordings or materials from the demo sessions are available via the event page afterwards.
More information on the event page.

> Fireside Chat Interview Series 2026

This fireside chat series invites seasoned leaders from research data infrastructures (RDI) to share hard‑won insights on building, running, and sustaining reliable data ecosystems. Each session uncovers practical lessons for long-term sustainability governance, federated services, community buy-in, and long‑term sustainability – designed to inspire the current and future RDI leaders. The series is co-organised by the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) which builds the essential bridges to the global community on RDM challenges and infrastructures. The recordings of the session are published on Youtube and shared via the event page.
More information on the event page.

However, these are not the only user-focused events that Base4NFDI organises. It all began with our Base4NFDI Services Roadshow, which was tailored for infrastructure providers and developers, as well as researchers and users. During the events, the funded basic services were presented with a particular focus on the specific user groups. You can find all recordings and slides on their respective event pages: Services Roadshow 2024 and Services Roadshow 2025.

As we hope this post has made clear, engaging with users and the community is of the utmost importance to Base4NFDI. After all, how useful are the best services if nobody uses them?

Base4NFDI User Conference

In our previous article we gave you an overview of our community activities, with a focus on the events we’re organising for and with our community. One big part of this is our yearly Base4NFDI User Conference, the UC4B. We therefore would like to take this opportunity to give you a little recap of what happened so far at our UC4Bs and at the end of this article, you will also find an invitation to this year’s conferences. 

As you might know, we so far have convened two user conferences—UC4B 2024 in Berlin and UC4B 2025 in Aachen—to advance the joint development, integration, and sustainable operation of basic services. Across both events, the emphasis evolved from presenting early service prototypes and interrogating interoperability challenges to focusing on rollout, sustainability, and hands-on cooperation with consortia and international partners. The user conferences serve as the initiative’s focal point for presenting service progress, gathering community feedback, and operationalising agreements on technical integration, governance, and policy alignment.

UC4B 2024: Bridging the gap between services, providers, and users

Held on 20 and 21 November 2024 at Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, the first user conference brought together almost 200 participants from the NFDI community, including international guests. Its core objectives were to:

• Present the set of basic services under development and their state of technical maturity by late 2024.
• Strengthen a shared understanding of the opportunities and challenges in implementing these services across diverse consortia.
• Critically examine technical interoperability and the role of local guidelines and policies in service adoption.

A keynote by Lilli Freda and Daniele Bailo (EPOS‑ERIC), chaired by Sonja Schimmler (Fraunhofer FOKUS), foregrounded interoperability in practice and the implications for European‑level alignment. Key takeaways highlighted the need to widen the user group of basic services, involve more institutions, and connect national RDM activities to our offerings. The conference programme also addressed how consortia can commit to services, what agreements are required, and how components could be offered at EOSC level.

UC4B 2025: Uniting the community, users and services

The second user conference took place on 28 and 29 August 2025 in Aachen, in tandem with the CoRDI 2025 conference. Reflecting increased service maturity, UC4B 2025 shifted towards sustainability, future users, and practical rollout. The event was structured in three parts:

• A dedicated Base4NFDI slot within CoRDI.
• A panel discussion followed by an evening reception.
• A focus day on basic services, enabling direct, hands‑on engagement between service teams, users, and implementation leads.

The agenda targeted both technical and organisational implementation of basic services within NFDI, while situating these efforts within international perspectives on research infrastructure development.

Thematic continuities and evolution

Several themes connect both conferences while showing clear progression:

• From presentation to operationalisation: 2024 emphasised showcasing services and clarifying interoperability and policy constraints; 2025 emphasised sustainable operation and concrete rollout pathways in consortia.
• Interoperability and EOSC alignment: Early discussions on what “interoperability with EOSC actually means” matured into more applied sessions on proxies, authentication/authorisation (e.g., IAM4NFDI), and integration patterns.
• Community building: Both events underlined the importance of broadening participation across institutions and disciplines, with 2025 explicitly framing the conference as “uniting the community, users and services.”

UC4B 2026: Registration is open!

Whether you have been to one or even both of our User Conferences or not, we warmly invite you to register for this year’s event. It will be in Berlin at the Staatsbibliothek from 24 until 25 November. The focus will be on hands-on sessions as well as strategic discussions, e.g. on operating models for basic services. As in the previous years, participation is free of charge and we are very much looking forward to welcoming you. 
You can directly register here. Further information can be found on the event page.

And if you want to browse through the UC4B-related presentations, you can do so in our respective Base4NFDI Zenodo communities: UC4B 2024 and UC4B 2025.