1.1. Overview

SIG-RED: Special Interest Group on Research Engagement Development

SIG-RED will formalize an existing collaboration of NRENs (and other research infrastructures) working together to develop methods for engaging researchers and collaborations nationally and internationally, through a set of reports, workshops, and best practices. The scope of the task force focuses on collaboration between the participating NRENs/research infrastructures, who then work within their own countries to engage their research support offices and collaborations. The SIG-RED aims to develop a framework for research engagement amongst the participating NREN community, and other research infrastructures. The results of the task force will yield documentation for other NRENs/research infrastructures to develop their own form of research engagement, which will benefit the various research domains across Europe (and beyond), and communicate and strengthen collaboration between/with other e-infrastructures/research infrastructures.

1.2. Aims

The special interest group aims to develop a framework for research engagement through a set of reports, workshops, and best practices to help participating NRENs support their research communities. This will result in:

1. Increasing our understanding of research workflows (beyond the “usual suspects” such as high-energy physics);
2. Gathering and sharing information, which can be used to improve network/research architecture and design;
3. Understanding what is important to researchers so that NRENs (and other infrastructures) can be more responsive to their needs;
4. Building a body of knowledge about research applications (for instance, as correlated to network utilisation), which can be cited in interactions with larger community and policy efforts.

The special interest group is open to anyone to participate and we will seek collaboration with other infrastructures (such as Elixir, CLARIN, EPOS, ELI, ESS, EUDAT, EGI, PRACE etc.), but also other projects (European Open Science Cloud) with respect to research engagement efforts as a framework is developed within the NREN community.
By-products of SIG-RED will include:
- Supporting research collaborations that want to collaborate internationally;
- Establishing a continuous and permanent information flow between RENs and Science and Research communities;
- Coordinating reliable, predictable network behaviour in support of end-user (research) applications;
- Improving performance of network-centric and data-centric workflows.

1.3. The proposed achievements and KPIs for the task force are summarised in the table below

Activity Classification	Work Items and Descriptions	Results or Deliverables	Report
Strategy	Define a strategy document for the Task force	Values, Vision and strategy document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n4FIIkI8S-BsnlpYHRpjWzAeB5m-6g42W7a7-dY3wSY/edit?usp=sharing	ACHIEVED
Branding	Create a logo and branding guidelines for task force	logo and branding guide can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13BA9SMEvqtwuc7cx9IxGwD0zeXWBykW0	ACHIEVED
Data Gathering	Perform a survey to understand how NRENs and others are structured and perform research engagement.	Survey results and understanding of Research Engagement landscape. Report is to be run once every two years. EU4Digital: Connecting Research and Education Communities (EaPConnect)TF-RED NREN Research Engagement Survey 2020: EaP Region - https://geant.box.com/s/dvshet11dxgrx9973nlb1qtuuvfj4gcd	ONGOING
Audience Definition and Scoping Phase (Activity Leader: Sylvia)	Define audiences for NREN/ICT/local research support offices perspective.	Internal documentation and scoping for TF collaborators and NREN community.	Not- started
	Define research areas or communities (i.e., life sciences, climate, humanities, etc.) for TF collaborators. Extract from these defined areas research champions/advocates.	Create research advisory council for the TF from participating NREN countries.	Not- started
	Communicate TF-RED initiatives to influential funders and/or research officials.		ONGOING
Training Programme	Create a training course for research engagement in collaboration with GLAD.	Course (online or in person) which can be taken by TF-RED participants to improve their research engagement skills	Not- started
RED Blue-print document	Create a blue print document covering the why, how and the what of research engagement.	A document endorsed by the majority of the community. https://geant.box.com/s/kpw9m13dz4nj2wt4b1ir0qlt0lckcf05	ACHIEVED
	Create contact list of other infrastructures with brief description and collaboration opportunities	List of contacts	ONGOING
Landscape Analysis	Create a landscape analysis document about how and where and by whom research data is generated, moved from and too, for large international research projects.	A document for use within the community.	Not- started
Analysis and Reporting Phase (Activity Leader: Chris Atherton, Sylvia as back-up)	Work with SIG Marcomms to define mechanisms to publish the outcomes from TF-RED.	Public website presence.	Not-started (Wiki serving as public face)
	Community presentations to research domain peers and NREN community presentations to share outcomes.	Workshop(s) and planned conference sessions (at DI4R, ISC, SC, ICT Open) with e-infrastructure collaborators on materials and issues ultimately increasing the value and face of R&E to other infrastructure resources.	ACHIEVED