🌟 Summary of the RDM club meeting on June 2nd, 2026

The RDM Club meeting on 2 June 2026 featured a presentation by Alexander Bardel about the Austrian ELN community, which includes individuals from a network of universities in Austria who collaborate to provide sustainable Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) services.

The community aims to represent shared interests, develop national support structures, and promote interoperability, sustainability, and user-centred Research Data Management (RDM) infrastructure. Motivated by Austrian Open Science policies and long-term sustainability goals, the project has established cross-institutional collaborations, organised community events, and conducted an ELN feature survey. Although the funded project is ending, the community plans to continue through mailing lists, chat channels, shared training materials, internal documentation, and a future community platform for ELN operators. Participants agreed that while national coordination is valuable, support networks should remain as close to researchers as possible.

Attendees also gave updates on ongoing projects and community activities. Summer projects included integrating educational eLabFTW instances with external tools, evaluating new ELN rollouts, and finalising an RDM course with lab management templates. Additional developments include an AI assistant for eLabFTW that can identify missing information and support data entry, with the long-term goal of enabling voice control, as well as work on identity provider and single sign-on solutions across institutions.

Please join us for the next RDM club meeting, which will take place in early Autumn.

• elabftw
• rdm club