Governance Structure

Overall Structure

The European Interoperability Framework¹ defines four types of interoperability:

• Legal Interoperability is about ensuring that organisations operating under different legal frameworks, policies and strategies are capable to work together.

• Organisational Interoperability refers to the way in which public administrations align their business processes, responsibilities and expectations to achieve commonly agreed and mutually beneficial goals.

• Semantic Interoperability ensures that the precise format and meaning of exchanged data and information is preserved and understood throughout exchanges between parties.

• Technical Interoperability covers the applications and infrastructures linking systems, services and resources. Aspects of technical interoperability include interface specifications, interconnection services, data integration services, data presentation and exchange, and secure communication protocols.

Figure 12 - European Interoperability Layers

The Governance structure is derived from the European Interoperability Framework with some slight re-interpretation of the four layers, as illustrated in Figure 12; within the context of EOSC, Legal Interoperability also includes Policy interoperability as well as Rules of Participation for EOSC; and Organisational Interoperability includes both Strategy and Funding.

Currently, the Rules of Participation (RoP)² are broad and can cover different aspects. It currently focuses on rules and guidelines for resource organisations to promote and offer resources through the EOSC Portal. In the evolution of the EOSC Portal, the Governance model will need to address how Resource Organisations might need to define their Rules of Participation when they may appear in many different services catalogues (e.g. at a national or institutional level) with different RoP whilst remaining “compliant” within the EOSC Portal’s presentation of services and other offerings.

Figure 13 - Overall Governance Structure

Legal, the resource allocation aspects of Organisational, and Technical would form three pillars within the Stakeholder layer, Semantic (in terms of operational implementation of all the EIF layers) would be the responsibility of the Executive which would mirror the three pillars of the Stakeholder layer. Other strategic aspects of Organisational as well as oversight of all EIF layers would rest within the Strategic layer. The overview of these layer and pillars is shown in Figure 13, and outlined in Table 6.

Each of these three layers would have a coordinating Board with strong reporting lines between these Boards. However, it is anticipated that there would be other liaison between the layers – in particular, between the Stakeholder and Executive layers as outlined above.

Table 6 - Governance Structure Layers

Strategic Governance

Figure 14 - Strategic Governance

As the Strategic Governance (Figure 14) should involve the representatives of national policy and national funding agencies, we believe that the European Commission and its existing structures should inform the exact nature of this structure. It is possible, for example, that this might be a task for an existing structure such as the ERAC. However, we do foresee that the EOSC might grow beyond Europe, and hence the governing board should include representation from all countries wishing to join and support the EOSC – hence the reference to EOSC member countries rather than EU member countries.

Stakeholder Governance

Governance Structure

Figure 15 - Stakeholder Governance

A recommendation from the EOSC 2^nd^ HLEG is to have the Stakeholders Forum move its focus in 2019 to a more user centred approach in order to guarantee a “Voice of the Users,” including practical cases of how EOSC is making a difference to “how things were done previously” for them in their thematic areas.

The Stakeholder forum (Figure 15) would have three key pillars, approximately mapping to the EIF layers of Technical, Organisational and Legal respectively:

• A Technical Oversight Committee to agree and monitor quality standards for the EOSC Resources. It would handle quality assignment requests, and quality measure monitoring, liaising closely with the EOSC System Steering Committee and overseeing the scientific discipline technical subcommittees. The team will rely on internationally set standards that can be audited by external parties and relies on their input for quality assignment. They will also keep track of resource and service quality monitoring. It would be informed by research community specific sub-committees, which would define and check quality measures on behalf of research communities. This would be formed by any community that can sustain such an effort for longer periods of time. They will report to the EOSC TC but assign and maintain quality measures independently.

• A Research Resource Demand Committee to have oversight in how EOSC resources are allocated – this will be informed by research community specific panels

• A Policy and Rules of Participation Oversight Committee to recommend research policy alignment – this will be informed by research community specific sub-committees. This would subsume the stakeholder policy related aspects of the Policy Standing Committee proposed in the EOSCPilot policy recommendations³ after the initial implementation period of the EOSC.

In addition, the Legal pillar would also include an Ethics and Legal Advisory Board⁴ whose mandate would be to identify ethical and legal and policy issues to review the actions of EOSC from an ethical and legal perspective, as well as acting as the source of further ethical and legal initiatives within the organisation. This would sit in the Stakeholder forum, reporting to the Stakeholder Engagement Board to ensure its independence but would have a close advisory and liaison line into the Executive Board.

Supporting Structures

The European Interoperability Framework includes the concept of overlapping domains and this can be used to understand how different communities would need to interact. This can be applied to scientific and research domains, comparable to the Domain Interoperability Frameworks in the diagram (Figure 16). Each scientific domain has its own best practices and standards, and the role of EOSC is to determine and coordinate the overlap between these different domains. In this way, it provides “guidance only where guidance is due”. It also applies to how different providers and intermediaries should engage with the EOSC Governance, in that it is the intersection of practices and standards between International, National and Local provision of resources which is important for EOSC. This is the principle behind the various subcommittees and panels within the three pillars.

Figure 16 - European Interoperability Framework Domains of Domains

There are a number of models used in other organisations which were considered in structuring the Stakeholder Model. Examples include the IETF (for internet standards), RDA (for Research Data Management), WISE Community (for e-infrastructure security), OASIS (for Web Service and metadata standards) and W3C (for Web standards). The main differences between these concern their legal and financial structures, but in terms of governance, they can broadly be modelled to two or more of the levels outlined in Figure 17.

Figure 17 - Stakeholders Forum Organisational Model

This model includes:

• Oversight, e.g. a board or committees that agrees the rules of membership, engagement and processes and acts as the key contact point with the Strategic and Executive layers.

• Standing Groups, e.g. for Thematic Areas, either based on the Interoperability Contexts, the Stakeholder Roles or broad scientific or infrastructure domains, dealing with specific thematic domains.

• Working Groups, that are time based, work on specific areas with the priorities determined by the Stakeholder forum governance in conjunction with the Strategic and Executive layers of the EOSC Governance.

• Emergent Topic Groups discuss new activities that may lead to working groups.

Table 7 below illustrates how various community organisations map to this model.

Table 7 - Community Organisation Structures

Within the Stakeholder Mode, ‘Oversight’ is provided by the Stakeholder Engagement Board, and ‘Standing Groups’ by the various pillars. However, it is also foreseen that the Stakeholder Model needs time limited ‘Working Groups’ to ensure future development and evolution of the EOSC.

In terms of organisational or legal structure, the Stakeholder engagement forum should be open to all stakeholders and should borrow from structures such as RDA or open source foundation models.

Any structure for the Stakeholders Forum should use the key principles of ISO 38500 (Governance of IT) as guiding principles, namely:

• Responsibility – Stakeholders know their responsibilities, both in terms of demand and supply of EOSC resources and have the authority to meet them.

• Strategy – Business and funding strategies should be aligned with technological possibilities, and all the technologies and resources within EOSC within an organisation should support the EOSC objectives and strategies.

• Acquisition – all investments must be made based on a research case with regular monitoring in place to assess whether the assumptions still hold.

• Performance – the performance of EOSC resources should lead to research benefits and therefore it is necessary that the resources support research properly.

• Conformance – EOSC resources should help to ensure that research processes comply with legislation and regulations; EOSC resource themselves must also comply with legal requirements and agreed internal rules.

• Human behaviour – policies, practices and decisions respects human behaviour and acknowledges the needs of all the people in the process.

Underpinning this, there may need to be a legal structure such as a charity, and a Secretariat or other supporting agency which might be shared with the Executive, however, the independence of the Stakeholder Engagement Forum is paramount.

Executive Governance

Governance Structure

Figure 18 - Executive Governance

The Executive Governance (Figure 18) would have three key pillars, approximately mapping to the EIF layers of Technical, Organisational and Legal respectively, in a Semantic (i.e. Operational sense), as outlined in Table 8:

Table 8 - Executive Governance Pillars

Supporting Structures

There are broadly three potential models for the EOSC to commission and provide financial support to Core and Supported EOSC Resources. Each model can be regarded as both an intermediate step towards more complicated models as well a potential end state. Each model may be supported by a legal structure (such as an ERIC) and a secretariat or other supporting agency which might be shared with the Stakeholder Engagement Forum.

Lightweight Delivery Model

The Executive commissions and pays for (either directly or through some compensatory mechanism) Core and Supported resources from international, national, institutional and commercial providers through existing mechanisms (e.g. Framework Programme instruments such as Virtual Access) as shown in Figure 19. The pros and cons of this approach are outline in Table 9.

Figure 19 - Light Weight Executive Delivery Model

Table 9 - Light Weight Executive Delivery Model: Pros and Cons

Commissioning Authority

The establishment of a new entity (possibly a legal structure such as an ERIC) that would have responsibility for commissioning (e.g. contracting or framework agreements) Core and Supported Resources, as shown in Figure 20. The pros and cons of this approach are outline in Table 10.

Figure 20 - Commissioning Authority

Table 10 - Commissioning Authority: Pros and Cons

Delivery Authority

The establishment of a new entity (possibly a legal structure such as an ERIC) that would have responsibility for delivering Core and Supported Resources, either directly or through contracting or framework agreements with third parties, as show in Figure 21. The pros and cons of this approach are outline in Error! Not a valid bookmark self-reference..

Figure 21 - Delivery Authority

Table 11 - Delivery Authority: Pros and Cons