Friday, July 05, 2013

Moving to ANDS in Australia

As you might have guessed from the last posting, I will be leaving Knowledge Exchange. I am really looking forward to starting work as Partnership Program Manager at the Australian National Data Service, ANDS for short. The Australian Commonwealth Government's Department of Industry, Innovation, Science Research and Tertiary Education has had the foresight to fund and support the development of ANDS at a time when other countries had not even started considering the value of Research Data as a very important research asset. This has allowed ANDS to become a leading organisation worldwide in setting up services like ‘Research Data Australia’ and ‘Cite My Data’ I am really looking forward to learning about the Australian landscape at work and discovering some more of the physical Australian landscape at the weekends. I will be starting work on 1st of September at the ANDS office at Monash University
in Melbourne.

Four and a half years at Knowledge Exchange

Digital Author Identifier Summit in London
It has been rather quiet on this blog. The main reason is that I put most of my energy in communicating work related stuff through Knowledge Exchange, through the website, twitter, etc. The past years at Knowledge Exchange were very lively and taught me a lot. Working with the partner organisations has shown me the value and richness of the different cultural backgrounds and approaches. I have learnt a lot from the insights of the experts. What is also great is the variety in interests of the partner organisations ranging from research funding, infrastructure funding, innovation, libraries and tackling the range from hard to soft e-infrastructure. In my view the true power behind KE is the interaction between the experts in the partner organisations and countries. It was always really inspiring to bring a group of experts together and to see how quickly discussions arose and the speed in which great ideas could be developed. The years have been quite lively, some really relevant reports were released and workshops organised. The initiative has recently been expanded with the fifth member, CSC. The challenge is now to balance large expectations and ambitions with the limited scale which is KE. It never has been a large initiative and its power has been to pick out the small ground breaking activities where it is really useful to bring knowledge together, share, develop this further and start a debate. I trust this will continue to lead to valuable results in the future.