TopicUK TRE community direction#

Session 1, Room 1

  • Chair: Hari Sood

Prompts#

  • What is the purpose of this group?

  • How to support the purpose?

  • Should there be paid resource ensuring delivery/accountability? In what form?

    • Is it roles hired by DARE?

    • Is it funding people at their institutions?

Notes#

  • About a year old now. Would be great to brainstorm what the group is, what it needs.

  • Initial idea was to form working groups, see what comes out. Reality is that no one has time to dedicate to working groups.

  • The ‘ritual’ of having these meetings is important on its own. Brings the community together.

  • Working groups are important, but they are not sustainable when we expect people to work on them in free time. How can we fund this? Find funding? Expect teams to prioritise working group tasks?

  • Really good place for knowledge sharing and just knowing what’s going on

    • E.g. keynote could’ve been a bigger chunk of the day, less time for discussions

  • This group is about bringing people together to be aware that other TRE teams exist and are operating in this space

    • If knowledge sharing is the best way to bring people together, then we should be going that

    • Be driven by what people want to bring together and their needs

  • Getting people to talk, having useful discussions with actions/where decisions are made. Most difficult bit but most valuable bit. If we have someone who’s organising it, that’s what we should be trying to do. Using talks as a way to draw people in and make it more welcoming, but if it was just people giving presentations, that’s a bit of a loss. We should focus on the difference we can make

  • How can DARE support the interest groups most effectively. What are the ways that a funder can support the activities of this group (e.g. events, parts of peoples’ time).

  • Should our ambition be to pull activities together to work on health data science, and make the UK an attractive place to do health data science?

  • These should be more solution based. We should be focused on solutions (in the venue we are trying to do with project breakouts), in addition to knowledge sharing

  • Lots of other sensitive data beyond health data. We’re probably not the right group to make the UK the best place to do health data science. DARE and UK TRE WG aren’t the ones to get traction there

  • This group is well placed to represent the RSE community within the UK. If this group doesn’t do that, we’ll find there are a lot of data providers that are ideal for their data but not ideal for RSEs. Someone needs to emerge as an advocate for RSE priorities, e.g. tools, publication etc. NHS will be advocate for protecting it’s own data

    • Should this be extended to users

  • Instead of saying ‘buy out time of WG chairs’ can it be DARE employing someone to support the WGs.

  • While it doesn’t have to be about buying out FTEs some departments do need some financial support, which can take the form of travel, expenses etc.