DataPLANT governance: First round of board meetings held
Fri Sep 11 2020
During the beginning of September the board meetings were held, starting with the Senior ManagementBoard followed both by the Scientific and Technical bards. The first round of meetings got chaired bythe speaker, future meetings will be coordinated by a board chair supported by the office. It was decided to make the relevant informationtransparent; thus the slides and minutes are directly available via the linked PDFs. All information presented and decisions made will be made public in the future as well at least to all participants of DataPLANT. Until DataPLANT is officially started, the new web site is becoming available and the cooperation and participation tools are deciced upon, the documents will reside on the preliminary web site.
The Senior Management Board directly reports to the General Assembly and represents the community inbetween GA meetings. It oversees all TA activities (with a focus on TA4) and finances and takes care of the strategy development. The Technical Board employs technical and infrastructuralexperts and moderates the various infrastructure requirements and data service offerings anddecides on resource distribution/allocation, future development of new offerings or thedeprovisioning of deprecated services. It will receive input mainly from TA2 and TA3. The scientific board consists mostly of plant scientists and computer scientists developing services and advises on standardization needs and develops foresight processes. It focuses on the TA1 and TA3.The boards take the input from both the general assembly and the senior managementboard and outside requests (e.g. from other consortia or the NFDI super structure). All boards willbe supported by the DataPLANT office; the post will be offered soon through the usual channels.
Both technical and scientific boards moderate requests, which were notdecided within the respective body to the high-level decision-making committee, the seniormanagement board. The senior management board consists of all co-speakers of DataPLANTand reports to the general assembly. Whilst the senior management board strives to makeunanimous decisions, it will employ a simple majority vote principle where in case of a tie vote thecoordinator decides. The office handles the everyday business on behalf of the managementboard and the disbursement of funds of the sub NFDI. It is the first point of contact for the general NFDI processes, the facilitation of the inter NFDI exchange and the DataPLANT community (bothparticipants and new users). It acts on behalf of the management board in between meetings andbuffers incoming requests. The office takes care of the financial affairs of DataPLANT and reportsannually to the general assembly and back to the grant provider. Furthermore, it handles inter-NFDI affairs and supports the coordination of cross cutting topics. The DataPLANT governance and coordination is designed to be open for adaptation; the NFDI governance - which will get fixed through the association registration process in October - was identified as a joint topic relevant for all consortia. The suggested structures will be put into a regular reviewingscheme by the general assembly and the senior management board. Both inputs from theDataPLANT community as well as from the NFDI in general will be considered.