This year’s EOSC Symposium is steadily approaching, and the work to prepare an interesting, engaging and thought-provoking event programme for you has started! This edition is hosted in Berlin at the H4 Hotel Alexanderplatz, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 32.
To ensure that the Symposium programme reflects the voices of the EOSC community, we’d like to invite you to join us in planning the programme through a Call for Unconference Sessions. This gives you an exciting opportunity to draw attention to topics that you believe are important to EOSC.
Submit a proposal and contribute to shaping the biggest EOSC event of the year by filling in the form below!
GUIDELINES AND CONDITIONS
To help you prepare an engaging and successful proposal, please follow the guidelines below:
Who can submit a session?
- Submission is open to EC-funded projects and global, European, national and local initiatives, organisations and individuals contributing to EOSC.
Topic of the session
- Sessions should focus on relevant EOSC results, impact or advancing key topics within EOSC.
- Sessions focusing only on an individual project will be rejected. You should liaise with other EOSC-related projects or relevant stakeholders and initiatives to prepare your proposal.
Format of the session
- Each session will have a duration of 1 hour. The session will run in parallel with two other Unconference sessions.
- Plan your session to be as interactive as possible – use the unique opportunity to work on a topic together with the whole community!
- The speakers and/or panelists of the sessions must participate in person.
- The sessions will be livestreamed but no live online interaction will be possible.
- All the rooms are in theatre style, and it is not possible to change to a different layout. Each room has a capacity of around 100 participants. The room will have the following basic equipment: projector, laptop, clicker, cameras for live streaming, and maximum five chairs for panelists. Please take this into consideration in your planning.
How the sessions will be selected
Altogether six Unconference sessions will be selected, each with a 1-hour slot.
After the call period has ended, the EOSC Symposium’s Programme Committee will conduct a first evaluation of the submitted topics. If your proposal overlaps with one of the sessions prepared by the Programme Committee, it might become part of the main programme. The macro-level topics currently considered by the Programme Committee include for example:
- EOSC Tripartite collaboration and future EOSC governance
- EOSC Federation
- Sustainability factor and impact of FAIR data
- EOSC in the countries
- EOSC relations with ESFRIs & ERICs
- EOSC engagement with industry
- Data Spaces and EOSC
- Skills, training and careers
The remaining eligible sessions will be subjected to an open vote, where the community may choose the topics that interest them the most to be featured at the Unconference!
Timeline
- Call for Unconference sessions, 6 February – 18 March 2024 (17:00 CET)
- Programme Committee evaluation, 19 – 31 March 2024
- Notification to applicants (rejected applications, applications that will become part of the main programme, accepted sessions for Unconference), 2 April 2024
- Unconference sessions open for voting, 8 – 26 April 2024
- Communication of the 6 successful Unconference sessions, 3 May 2024
- The six successful Unconference applicants will have to provide a draft agenda of the session to the Programme Committee by the end of May. The semi-final programme of the session has to be ready by early June in order to be published online as part of the main programme.
If you have any questions about the call, please contact symposium2024@eosc.eu.
Results of the Call for Unconference Sessions
Numerous sessions were submitted under the Call for Unconference Sessions, demonstrating the EOSC community’s strong commitment to sharing knowledge and exchanging thoughts about a variety of EOSC-related topics. Sixteen sessions were selected by the Programme Committee and submitted to a community vote.
The Call for Unconference Sessions ran from 06 February – 18 March 2024, and more than 500 votes were submitted. The six most popular sessions are listed below. They will become an integral part of the EOSC Symposium 2024 programme.
Open Science Competence Center in EOSC and beyond
This unconference session will delve into the roles, design and possible definitions of Competence Centres (CCs) within the EOSC context and beyond. Participants will discuss the definitions and scopes of CCs, share examples of tangible initiatives, evaluate their impact, and identify challenges and opportunities. Discussion will be driven starting from concrete results and updates on, among others, the recent developments of both OSCARS project and of the Skills4EOSC Network.
Organisers: Skills4EOSC, OSCARS, EOSC-EuroScienceGateway, EOSC Focus, EVERSE, OA5 Expert Group
Open as possible, restricted as necessary; EOSC sensitive data exchange
The session will address the topic from two points of view. First, a series of flash talks will introduce the problem space we seek to address – drivers and use cases from biomedical research and the social sciences, and the challenges specific research communities face in finding, sharing and analysing data sets while respecting the rights and ethical principles which apply. This will be followed by a panel of the speakers, and open discussion with the audience to develop a shared understanding of the requirements.
Second, talks from the providers of proposed solutions will sketch out the future design of EOSC solutions for sensitive data – technologies for the deployment of secure Cloud or physical technologies, and the development of operational, policy and legal frameworks.
Again the speakers and audience will engage in a conversation about what this will mean for the future capabilities of EOSC service providers.
Organisers: ELIXIR, EUDAT, EOSC-ENTRUST, Universidad de Murcia, TITAN, EOSC-SIESTA, CSIC
No data without software!
In a short introductory presentation, the audience will dive into two topics: (1) the role of software in scientific processes and (2) the profile of software and development processes required to achieve reproducibility and reuse of related research data. This will include describing semantically the research process, archiving software and reopening time-capsules after a long time period.
While guiding through these topics, an interactive format will be used to give the audience the possibility to talk about existing experiences and pain points from (not) using long-archiving infrastructure. Lowering barriers, involving as many perspectives as possible from various scientific fields, could help to gather requirements and sharpen the idea of a supportive research environment.
The goal is to refine the needs for sustainable research software development within and across scientific disciplines, and to elaborate on related future infrastructure and methodological developments by reflecting on these needs.
Organisers: NFDIxCS, NFDI4DataScience, Software Heritage Foundation, FAIRCORE4EOSC
Data competencies: training, education, qualification for researchers and data stewards
After a brief introduction to the state of knowledge of different target groups such as researchers and data stewards on research data management and data science, a panel discussion will address important issues for the further development of training and education for these target groups. The focus will be on questions of verifiable qualification (certificate), e.g. to be allowed to work with sensitive data, suitable training and education formats and their international standardisation options.
Organisers: National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) Section EduTrain, NFDI4Health (National Research Data Infrastructure for personal health data), DALIA Knowledge-Base for FAIR data usage and knowledge graph
Findability in FAIR: touchpoints between EOSC and Open Web Search
This session investigates synergies within science-search-focused contexts through examples from OpenWebSearch.eu, FAIRCORE4EOSC and FAIR-IMPACT.
European web search technology is a crucial element in Europe’s independence in searching, finding and using information based on European values and regulation. The new open web index developed by OpenWebSearch.eu will provide researchers with accessible, accurate and high-quality web data at scale. FAIRCORE4EOSC develops horizontal, general-purpose technical solutions for EOSC core to improve Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of research outputs. FAIR-IMPACT supports the implementation of FAIR-enabling practices, tools and services across scientific communities at European, national, and institutional levels.
The session presents solutions developed for findability and the means to deploy them through the above-mentioned projects and discusses how this improved findability impacts science, industry and society as a whole. The above also contributes to the objectives outlined in the EOSC SRIA and to Europe’s sovereignty for accessing and using the web.
Organisers: FAIRCORE4EOSC, FAIR-IMPACT, OpenWebSearch.eu
EOSC collaborative frontiers to achieve interoperability and enhance scholarly data
This session aims to provide an introduction to the Scientific Knowledge Graph – Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF) model and illustrate its application as a strategic tool for achieving interoperability among scholarly data sources in various EOSC-related projects. The SKG-IF aim is to serve as a lingua-franca for SKGs providing a common vocabulary for key entities, relationships, and attributes found in scholarly data sources. In this session, representatives from four projects will explain their experiences with utilising and extending SKG-IF in their contexts. More specifically, GraspOS, SciLake, and OSTrails representatives will present enhancements to the model to better accommodate specific applications: research assessment, domain knowledge discovery, and data management and FAIRness, respectively. Alongside, FAIRCORE4EOSC representatives will discuss how their Metadata Schema and Crosswalk Registry can facilitate conversions between SKG-IF and other formats. Through these presentations, the session will spotlight contributions to improving EOSC’s data interoperability and provoke a dynamic exchange of ideas.
Organisers: GraspOS, SciLake, OSTrails, FAIRCORE4EOSC
