[Maggie Hellström]

Dear all FAIR DO Fabric IG members,
as part of the ‘A Decade of Data: Celebrating 10 Years of the RDA’ activities taking place in 2023, RDA is organising a series of community cross-fertilisation workshops, aimed at bringing together RDA community groups and members with the wider research data community to discuss how to increase awareness of ongoing activities and stimulate new collaborations. 
On February 23, 08:30 – 10:15 UTC, the RDA WGs and IGs working on FAIR-related topics will meet for such a workshop to talk about the future of FAIR data, software and hardware. We would like to encourage you to join us at the event – please find more information and a registration link at https://www.rd-alliance.org/community-cross-fertilisation-pilot-workshop-rda-fair%C2%A0 
As part of the workshop preparations, all participating groups were asked to provide responses to 3 questions – these will be discussed at the workshop. Below, we list the questions and the answers from the point of view of the FAIR DO Fabric IG co-chairs; please feel free to comment on these here in the mailing list. 
Looking forward to reading your feedback on these Q&As, and to seeing you at the workshop!
Maggie, Lori, Rainer and Rob
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Q1: What are the main challenges that should be addressed within the theme of FAIR data, software and hardware over the next two years? 
A1: Agreeing on a common (harmonized and globally accepted!) representation of research data and other assets is crucial to support large-scale machine-driven processing and analysis. The FAIR Digital Object Concept meets the requirements, but global harmonisation and coherence between implementations is lacking. Much more must be done on explaining the concept and its application to all relevant stakeholders, including funders, data stewards and researcher communities – for example by providing a set of well-explained use cases from both academia and “industry” that illustrate how pervasive application of semantics and typing enable streamlined linking between FAIR resources.  
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Q2: How can the RDA community groups address these challenges over the next two years? 
A2: To be effective, the RDA needs intensive information exchange between, and coordination of, its many active groups. Many groups (and their co-chairs) have little knowledge of what is happening elsewhere, leading to both overlaps & parallel developments and gaps. These cross-fertilisation workshops are a wonderful step in the right direction, but in the longer term we’ll also need a strong and engaged board of experts that concentrates on information  exchange and cross-fertilisation. In addition, a process to periodically reassess existing endorsed recommendations and outputs in order to identify, and label, content in need of updating would be very helpful.
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Q3: What initiatives (resources, tools, services), organisations and/or communities could the RDA community collaborate with in order to advance the theme of FAIR?
A3: To arrive at a comprehensive mapping of potential collaboration partners, we suggest that group chairs collaborate to create an inventory of organisations & communities currently represented by their (active) members – including information on their activities/initiatives around FAIR and possibilities to involve them in RDA activities. Before that is done, here are a few suggestions:
* Organisations: FORCE11, CODATA/WorldFAIR, the FAIR DO Forum (GO-FAIR), DataCite, CrossRef, EOSC Association, ESIP,  …
* Communities: data producing entities and communities, including research infrastructures and larger discipline-overarching groups, as well as data repositories 
* Publishers, funders and policy makers from across the world (not just US/Australia/Europe)

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