Second face-to-face meeting of the WG Sustainability Helsinki, 23 October 2019

The EOSC Sustainability Working Group (WG) met face-to-face for the second time on 23rd October 2019 in Helsinki. The objective of the meeting was to review the feedback received on the strawman document and get an update on the progress of the task forces. Following the introductions, the meeting started with a recap of the EOSC@RDA event that took place the day before, when the strawman document was presented to an audience of about 40 participants and led to breakout sessions addressing the following questions:

• What do you see as the minimum set of services in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
• How do you think international research infrastructures can best engage, federate and interoperate with EOSC platform?
• What do you see as the added-value of EOSC?
• For you, what would constitute success for EOSC?
• What is the value that EOSC delivers that services do not on their own?

A summary of the results of these breakout sessions was reported in the final plenary of the EOSC@RDA event.

The strawman version of the Solutions for a Sustainable EOSC report from the Sustainability Working Group was distributed in early September in order to gather feedback from the Governing Board, Executive Board and H2020 projects contributing to the EOSC. During September and October, more than 30 projects, organisations and board members provided written feedback. The Sustainability Working Group would like to thank all those who took the time to provide feedback, which was then analysed by a “strawman feedback task force” of the WG. The results of the analysis have been edited by the task force to produce a feedback analysis report by the end of October, which is planned to be shared subsequently with the Governance Board and the Executive Board. The feedback analysis will also be taken into account by the WG in preparing the next version of the Solutions for a Sustainable EOSC report.

Further task forces have also been formed with subsets of the Working Group members in order to examine specific points of the sustainability model. The business model task force will focus on costing the MVP as well as examining means of remunerating public sector service providers.

The task force on legal entities will analyse the European partnership model for EOSC (Co-funded or Co-programmed) and explore pros and cons of possible legal entities. The task force on integration of national infrastructures will examine the results of the Landscaping Working Group, H2020 projects and e-IRG to determine the potential scope and timing for federation of data infrastructures and services with EOSC.