Dear Friends of ENVRI-FAIR,
we have seen another year passing by which was dominated by COVID-19 restrictions and thus caused a tremendous impact on our working habits. There is still no option for face-to-face meetings, and we need to continue with online and remote work. Above all, we had to change the ENVRI Week 2021 into a fully virtual event which prevented the long-awaited opportunity for meeting again in person, having coffee breaks and dinner together and enjoying chatting about this and that. Now we face the weird situation that we may have many new colleagues in our community who never met in person the ENVRI-FAIR team members outside of their institutions. This is really a sad situation, but we must cope with it. More seriously, it seems like this situation will carry on far into the next year, with another virtual ENVRI Week in 2022. However, be assured that we are all still real human beings, not just avatars on ZOOM screens!
Despite the continuing and still massive impact on our life and work, we made big steps forward to reach the ambitious ENVRI-FAIR goals. The technical developments tackled by the successfully operating Task Forces make excellent progress and we can witness the growth of a robust foundation for FAIR based research structures in the environment domain. This encouraging development is driven by your strong commitment to making the ENVRI cluster FAIR and open.
There is one particularly promising development we like to point to, and that is the emerging ENVRI-Hub. During the Task Forces Meeting in November 2020, we intensively discussed the architecture concept of the ENVRI-Hub, weighed the pros and cons of the various proposals, and listened to the idea of building an ENVRI-Hub demonstrator based on Jupyter Notebooks. That was one year ago. Now, twelve months later, we see the ENVRI-Hub demonstrator materialising. Even more, it seems like the emerging ENVRI-Hub serves as an efficient FAIRificator since the integration of the various components stimulates the implementation of FAIR enabling resources and concepts at different levels. We are confident that there will be much to show during the upcoming project review in early 2022.
Concluding our End-of-the-Year message, we can only repeat from last year that your continuing engagement means by far more than contributing to a European project but bringing the spirit of FAIR and open data to life in the environmental sciences and beyond. In this sense, we wish you all a peaceful and relaxing break and a smooth start into the year 2022. Let’s keep the momentum!
Best wishes
Andreas, Ari and Katrin
ENVRI-FAIR Project Management Team