Data stewards as bridge builders between RDM Services and the Community
Technical RDM tools and services go hand in hand with personal support. Only when such tools can be well explained, presented and recommended do they reach the community and their full potential. On the other hand, data stewards in contact with customers are often asked for tools that can solve a specific problem they want to solve.
How can we make this interaction meaningful in both directions? Data Stewards in FAIRagro are actively spreading the word about the services when presenting at conferences, giving trainings and answering helpdesk request. They explain the role of the services in the data life cycle and why it makes a difference to use them. Currently, two key services in FAIRagro use the FAIRagro Helpdesk as a first point of contact: the FAIRagro Search Hub (https://search-hub.fairagro.net/) as well as the FAIRagro DMP Services (https://rdmo.fairagro.net/). In both cases, any question arriving at the helpdesk about these services is divided into a) content questions, where our data stewards can immediately help and b) developer questions, where we use our communication infrastructure to reach out to the service developers who then answer to the customer.
Close contact with data stewards offers further benefits: in order to make a service relevant and well-adapted to users’ needs, service developers are often on the lookout for test-users who can try out a service under real-life conditions. It is also interesting for them to get a behind-the-scenes look at a helpdesk and see which topics are most relevant to the community. Thirdly, data stewards can also act as test users, as they often have a trained eye for spotting which features are potentially most important to the community.
In the future, it is worthwhile to further combine the worlds of consultation and RDM services. Across consortia boundaries, FAIRagro is already involved in diverse networking activities, including the Geo-Chem-Life Science Helpdesk Cluster (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15065070) with 9 other consortia. If we are able to further utilize such networks also for recommending the fitting services, all parties will benefit: consumers, data stewards and service developers.