How The RDA Works
With more than 16,000 individual members, 100+ organisational and affiliate members and over 35 regional networks covering 151 countries (July 2025), the RDA provides a neutral space where its members come together through focused global Working and Interest Groups and Communities of Practice to:
- develop and adopt infrastructure that promotes data-sharing and data-driven research
- accelerate the growth of a cohesive data community that integrates contributors across domain, research, national, geographical and generational boundaries.
The RDA Vision and Mission
- The RDA Vision: Researchers and innovators openly share and re-use data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.
- The RDA Mission: RDA builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing and re-use of data.
RDA Guiding Principles
The RDA is built on six fundamental values and participation is open to all who adhere to its Guiding Principles.
- Openness – Membership is open to all interested individuals who subscribe to the RDA’s Guiding Principles. RDA community meetings and processes are open, and the deliverables of RDA Working Groups are publicly disseminated.
- Consensus – The RDA moves forward by achieving consensus among its membership. RDA processes and procedures include appropriate mechanisms to resolve conflicts.
- Inclusivity– The RDA seeks to promote broad, balanced and inclusive representation of its membership and stakeholder communities.
- Harmonisation – The RDA works to achieve harmonisation across data standards, policies, technologies, infrastructure, and communities.
- Community-driven – The RDA is a public, community-driven body of volunteer members and organisations, supported by the RDA Secretariat.
- Non-profit and technology-neutral – The RDA does not promote, endorse, or sell commercial products, technologies, or services and the development of open and re-usable recommendations and outputs within the RDA is mandatory.
The RDA builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing and reuse of data.
What do we mean by “building the social bridges”?
The RDA is a unique network of global stakeholders from many different professions, scientific and technological disciplines and domains as well as qualifications. The RDA Member Directory allows you to search and connect with them.
What do we mean by “building the technical bridges”?
RDA Recommendations and Outputs are the technical bridges. They are the technical and social infrastructure solutions developed by RDA Working Groups, Interest Groups or Communities of Practice that enable data sharing, exchange, and interoperability. They have an important impact on solving data sharing problems and adoption in infrastructure environments by individuals, projects and organisations.
To improve global data sharing, exchange and interoperability, the RDA works on raising awareness and expanding the adoption of these outputs across all regions of the world.
RDA Plenaries
RDA Plenary Meetings are the community’s flagship biannual events. They are held twice a year, one hybrid and one fully virtual. They bring together hundreds of international attendees including researchers, data stewards, librarians, software developers, and policy advisors. Plenaries serve as important milestones for Working Groups, Interest Groups and Communities of Practice in progressing their work and delivering outputs.
Plenaries are working meetings. RDA groups come together in breakout sessions to advance their goals, hold joint sessions to explore synergies, and share updates with the wider community. Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions provide a space for new ideas and often give rise to new groups. Keynote sessions, poster presentations, and social events round out the programme, offering further opportunities for knowledge exchange and networking.
Once every two years, a Plenary is held as part of International Data Week (IDW), a larger conference organised jointly with CODATA and the World Data System (WDS).
Browse the past Plenary Meetings to explore previous programmes, presentations. and recordings.
Pathways
Pathways are thematic topics that help RDA members navigate the community’s work. Whether you are looking for a group to join, an output to adopt, or sessions to attend at a Plenary Meeting, pathways bring together everything the RDA is doing under a shared focus.
Pathways are used as a navigation tool across the whole website. Groups are tagged with a pathway when established. RDA Plenary Meeting group sessions are organised by pathways making it easier to find the sessions of interest in the programme and enhance the meeting experience. Browse a list of pathways below to explore what interests you:
- AI meets data: exploring use cases, applications and innovation
- Data Infrastructures and Environments – Discipline Focused
- Data Infrastructures and Environments – Generalist
- Data Lifecycles – Versioning, Provenance, Citation, and Reward
- Ethical data
- FAIR, CARE, TRUST – Adoption and Implementation, and Deployment
- FAIR, CARE, TRUST – Evaluation and Policy
- Research Software
- Semantics, Ontology, and Standardisation
- Training, Stewardship, and Data Management Planning
