Governance Model

Community Lead Governance

Ultimately, the governance model should allow the engagement of all stakeholders, in all stakeholder roles, such that they are peers in the decision making for EOSC. For this, EOSC can borrow from Community Governance in the public sector as typically used for local government or social community initiatives. In this context, Community governance refers to the processes for making all the decisions and plans that affect life in the community, whether made by public or private organisations or by citizens. To be effective, it considers three core community skills of engaging citizens, measuring results, and getting things done in order to help people and organisations make decisions about what actions to take in a community and to measure their impact and effectiveness. The interaction between these “skills” is shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8 - Effective Community Governance¹

The EOSC Declaration² defined three governance layers:

• Institutional – including EU Member States and the European Commission.

• Executive/Operational – including a governance board at the executive level and relevant working committees.

• Advisory – including a stakeholder forum.

These map very closely to the skills in the community governance model above. In this model, the Advisory layer from the declaration would involve the engaging citizens skills to determine the scientific and technical needs of the users. The term “Advisory” is meant, in this context, to concern engaging with all stakeholders. It is important that stakeholders are, and feel that they are, peers in the decision-making process. They should perform a role that is both advisory and guiding - it should provide strong guidance and direction (not just advisory) to the Strategic and Executive layers. Within the EC Staff Working Document³ and the Second HLEG Report⁴ this is referred to as the Stakeholder layer.

The declaration’s Institutional layer defines the strategic objectives and measures the impact and effectiveness of EOSC against these objectives and so would principally map to the Measuring Results skill. Within the EC Staff Working Document and the Second HLEG Report this is referred to as the Strategic layer.

Finally, the Executive\Operational layer would map to the Getting Things Done skill by ensuring that the EOSC delivers to meet the needs of the stakeholders through the strategic objectives set by the Institutional layer. Within the EC Staff Working Document and the Second HLEG Report this is referred to as the Executive layer.

These layers are illustrated in Figure 9.

Figure 9 - EOSC Governance Layers

The intersections of these skills and layers are important in delivering an effective governance structure for EOSC. The Stakeholder layer determines within its communities’ best practice, standards, rules of participation, in effect addressing the recommendations of “Guidance only where guidance is due” and “Define Rules of Participation for service provision in the EOSC” from the HLEG group report, as well as the scientific and technical requirements of the EOSC. This forms a discussion and interaction with the Strategic layer, articulates the strategic objectives for the EOSC, and the metrics to measure how well the EOSC delivers against these objectives. This leads to an interaction between the Strategic and Executive layers to determine how the EOSC is provisioned and commissioned to meet these objectives. Finally, there is be a feedback loop between the Stakeholder and Executive on how well the EOSC is meeting the communities’ needs, standards and practices, and a report back from the Executive to the Strategic layer on how effective the EOSC is meeting the strategy, and how effective the strategic goals are at capturing the real needs of the communities. This is outlined in Figure 10.

Figure 10 - Community Governance Model for EOSC

Decision Flow

The overall decision flow between these layers is outlined in Figure 11 (the structures within the layers is elaborated on in the next section on Governance Structure).

• The Stakeholder layer would allow the stakeholders to determine the requirements, policies and Rules of Participation, and make proposals on how these could be met to the Strategic Layer. The Strategic layer would review, agree and prioritise these proposals and requirements to form the strategic vision and objectives of the EOSC.

• The Executive layer would be responsible for ensuring that the EOSC meets this vision and these objectives by: commissioning Core resource as required; commissioning new Supported resources as required; ensuring that Supported resources are properly compensated; and ensuring that the resources within EOSC are both compliant and meet the strategic objectives.

• The Stakeholder layer would also communicate to the Executive how well the EOSC is meeting their requirements at an operational level, and the Executive would report this against the strategic objective to the Strategic layer.

For example, a scientific discipline (or disciplines) within the Stakeholder layer might define data interoperability and re-use principles for data within their domains. The Strategic layer would translate this into strategic objectives and requirements for resource within EOSC which handle such data. The Executive would have responsibility for ensuring such resources existed within EOSC, and would receive input from the Stakeholder layer on how well these resources are in enabling data interoperability and re-use. Alternatively, communities within the Stakeholder layer might identify key areas where training and support are required, the Strategic layer would again translate these to objectives, the Executive would ensure that there were resources within EOSC to meet these training and support requirements, and the Stakeholder would report how effective they are.

Figure 11 - Governance Decision Flow