I attended the "Advancing FAIR and Go FAIR in the U.S." workshop in February; the workshop covered topics on how to establish and promote FAIR culture and capabilities within a community. Many of the discussions were synergistic with the CDI activities, so I wanted to share some key points from the workshop with the CDI community. - Sophie Hou

(Logo from the Go FAIR Initiative)
Workshop Info
Title: Advancing FAIR and Go FAIR in the U.S.
Date: February 24th to 27th, 2020
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Goals:
- Facilitate development of a community of practice for FAIR awareness and capacity-building in the US
- Improve understanding of FAIR technologies, and how to teach this to others
- Preparation for teaching or supporting FAIR data management and policies for researchers, local institutions, professional organizations, and others
Link: https://www.sdsc.edu/services/data_science/research_data_services.html
Overall Summary:
- The workshop highlighted that advancing FAIR requires communal effort.
- In order to "FAIRify," it is important for a community to first determine its scope, goals, and objectives.
Key Notes:
- FAIR is an acronym from Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
- Typical challenges that a community could face when working on FAIR include:
- Knowledge gap
- Institutional inertia
- Community relationship building
- Expanding FAIR capacity
- Best way to adapt and adopt available FAIR resources
- The ultimate goal of enabling FAIR is to allow both humans and machines (especially machines) to use digital resources, so that analytics and re-use can be optimized.
- According to the Go FAIR Initiative (https://www.go-fair.org), FAIR can also be understood as Fully AI Ready. In other words, machines are able to know what the digital resources mean. Additionally, the digital resources are as distributed/open as possible, but can also be as central/closed as needed.
- Implementation of FAIR can be challenging because many concepts in the principles are multifaceted (including social, resource, and technical considerations).
- In order to advance FAIR, it is important to first establish a good (common) understanding of the FAIR principles.
- FAIR requires technical and disciplinary resources, but it also requires community support.
- When implement FAIR, we need to review choices and accept challenges; e.g. who is our "community", and determine what is specific to our "community".
- FAIR is not a “standard”. The local community context is important and necessary.
- The Go FAIR Initiative offers a 7-step "FAIRification" process: https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/fairification-process/
- Options for conducting a FAIR event/activity with one's community include:
- Multiple day, experts convening, tutorial/webinar, conference, unconference, hackathon, symposium, sprint, posters, etc.
- Participants of an FAIR event/actiity might have the following expectations:
- Share best practices/resources/learn new skills
- Tackle a problem
- Learn new concepts/skills
- Use FAIR as a them to track for other topics
- Collaborate to create a resource to be shared
- And more!
- Once a community has established its version of FAIR, it is important to connect with other communities. Convergence with different communities is key to grow FAIR.