4Memory has emerged through continual dialogue with its community, undertaking from the start to carefully evaluate community needs and maintain the greatest degree of transparency. Several meetings were held with community representatives and a call for use-cases was made. Later followed a call for participation and an accompanying survey of needs in the area of research data management and possible contributions to the consortium. In the first half of 2020 “community workshops” as virtual meetings took place:
The first two were oriented directly towards an interactive community engagement about the NFDI process and our plans for 4Memory. On two days we had the "4Memory Question Time". In online discussions between the task area coordinators an over 150 community members, we collect questions and answers and published them. You can download the full paper here.
The next step was to ask the community for short statements of the everyday challenges and needs faced by those working with historical research data. That was our call for "Problem Stories". Nearly 100 problem stories were submitted. Here you can search, read and have look at them.