On September the 20th, together with the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES), the RDA Spanish node celebrated its first national event within the 12th RES Users Meeting in collaboration with the University of Valencia.
 
The RDA session focused on presenting the national node to the Spanish Data Science community. Approximately 100 people attended the round table discussion. The audience included researchers working with HPC technologies, technicians and coordinators. Five representatives of the local authorities, node managers and expert users of RDA participated in the discussion regarding the relevance and future plans for RDA Spain. The number of Spanish node memberships raised by 37% after the event.
 

 
Jesús Marco (Spanish National Research Council – CSIC, VP), moderator of this round table discussion, opened the debate with a speech on new changes in data science and the evolution of open research data.
 

 
Sara Garavelli, RDA Programme Manager and TRUST IT Project Lifecycle Strategist, opened the panel introducing RDA Global and RDA Europe’s events as well as open calls.
 
Afterwards Emma Lazzeri, CNR and RDA Italian node Manager, summarized the current situation of the Italian node, highlighting its main goals, achievements and the synergies with other Italian organizations and the Spanish node.
 
Maria Martín, BSC and RDA Spanish node Manager, introduced the Spanish node to the Spanish community and outlined its purposes. She also shared the plans for future events, workshops and open calls and invited the community to participate.
 
From the RDA user perspective, Pierre-Antoine Bretonnière, Earth Sciences and Computational Earth Sciences Group at BSC, explained how his community has been always interested and involved in RDA and why it is relevant for them. He also emphasized that they created an RDA Interest Group and they are currently working hand in hand with the Spanish node to hire a scientist who will work with them and will get grants from RDA Spain.
 

 
To finalize the panel, Salvador Capella, (Life Sciences department at BSC) offered the view of another user who believes in the importance of sharing data for all the areas of science and technology.  He explained how coordinated by BSC, the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB) is organised as the Spanish Node of ELIXIR (a pan-European organization for Life Sciences). The mission of ELIXIR is to build a sustainable European infrastructure for biological information, supporting life science research and its translation to society, bioindustries, environment and medicine.
 
Attendees shared opinions, thoughts and questions during the last part of the session (Q&A).
 
One of the attendees of the event, Dr. Nadia Tonello, Head of Data Management at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), concluded: “The participation to the round table organized by the RDA Spanish node at the last RES User’s meeting was a clear expression of the great interest towards Open Research Data among the HPC community. I believe that HPC users engaged with the realization of the European Open Science Cloud will take full advantage of knowing RDA and participating to its initiatives.”