I am Mahmoud Barakat, MA in Cultural Heritage Studies at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. I have an engineering background, however, I became more interested in the data management field after doing an internship in archive and record management, where I was exposed to many data management aspects in archives and records management. I plan to do a PhD in the data and network science field.

At the RDAP summit, I learned many things that gave me more insightful visions into this field, however, the most important is how to develop data management skills. Also, I learned about R programming language and got some materials I am already learning to develop my skills in this language. I enjoyed both the presented topics and the connection with others, where most of them professionals and similar-interest fellows. I could connect a lot and get to know others in social events. The summit is well-organized, topics are selected well, and understandable for someone not fully professional. The session 3B: Supporting Cross-Disciplinary Communities with Lifecycle Data Infrastructure, which I did not think about it before. It gave details and information about institutions and organizations. Moreover, the presenters explained the obstacles that research communities face in their FAIR data, the collaboration challenges of cross-community activities, and how inventions in product development can enable communities to normalize FAIR data practices.

The conference’s theme presents a very important angle in the data science field. I believe it is important to build and create channels to ensure access to data targeting communities as a core of such an approach, and the theme emphasizes that. Moreover, it is important to learn from experience and build on learned lessons in order to develop, so, it is a well-designed theme. In my opinion, there is no specification of what kind/s of communities, where data usage, accessibility and management differ by the community activities and scope of work.

I was impressed by the different approaches to using and managing data by the presenting institutions and originations. More interestingly, I noticed the difference in these ways between the US and EU institutions, I am more familiar with the latter where I live. In this summit RDAP 2024, I learned and benefited from many aspects, approaches and perspectives on many topics, to mention some (Research data in scholarly communication, Approaches to the curation of simulation data, Audio-visual data curation, FAIR, Enabling connection throughout the data ecosystem, Incorporating web archiving into software curation workflows) which will help me in my endeavors as I plan to do PhD studies in network and geospatial topic, where I need data management skills and knowledge.