With the second very successful All-Hands-on-Deck meeting (AHoD 2), the NFDI-MatWerk took a big step forward as a team. We have intensified collaborations and are implementing a user-driven development of a common MatWerk infrastructure. Looking back, the first year was very busy filling various positions. This was followed by onboarding in the Task Areas Infrastructure, Ontology, Workflows, Community Interaction as well as Strategy Development and the associated institutions all over Germany.
In the second year we are determined to create an open development environment across the Task Areas, and continuously increase the interaction with the Participant Projects. Therefore, at the AHoD 2 we conducted user journeys as a central method on three Infrastructure Use Cases (IUC 02, IUC 04 and IUC 17) together with several Participant Projects. Here a guided, constructive and open interaction between Scientists and NFDI-MatWerk developers was established to identify the interface between scientific workflows, the necessary tools and digital infrastructure. From these, three interdisciplinary teams, one for each IUC, were established together with a responsible person from the Participant Projects. The goal of these three teams and the Participant Project is to present a first demonstrator for each IUC at the NFDI-MatWerk Conference end of June (27th-29th).
Personally, I’m very pleased with how many bright and creative minds are assembled in this endeavour, as well as their high motivation to solve some of the fundamental challenges in the Digital Transformation of Materials Science and Engineering and allow us to bring forward a new way of data-driven science.