On Wednesday, September 08, 2021 the senior management (SMB) board met again to discuss the current status of the project after pretty much one year of DataPLANT. The SMB's objective is the oversight of the general developments, interaction with other consortia and the general NFDI. It takes care of the strategy and standards development and suggests consortium members as experts for the relevant working groups. This meeting's agenda informed on the newly formed NFDI association and its vision, discussed aspects of community integration and public relations. Further it presented the ongoing developments regarding the ARC and the status of the toolchain associated with it as well as the DataPLANT ontology and ongoing standardization efforts.

Beside elaborating on the formal NFDI structure and the membership model the newly formed NFDI sections were presented. Those got defined in a succession of strategy workshops organized by the NFDI directorate with the consortia of the first round. Four sections got identified and prioritised to be created within the NFDI association's structure: (meta)data, terminologies and provenance; common infrastructures; training and education, ethical and legal aspects.

DataPLANT got invited to present itself as an NFDI consortium in the "Bausteine FDM" online publication, plus it presented current ideas and the status of the various concepts and developments at the "E-Science-Tage 2021: Share Your Research Data" - "Data Stewards as ambassadors between the NFDI and the community", "Tools and Services to structure the Data Jungle for fundamental plant researchers" and "Immutable yet evolving: ARCs for permanent sharing in the research data-time continuum". The project coordinator presented DataPLANT at the Chlamy conference 2020+1 which took place from the 29th August till 3rd September in France. Further, DataPLANT will attend the "MAdLand Annual Meeting 2021" in the coming week.

Another point in the meeting was the formalization of attaching new members to the consortium both through a more formal "Memorandum of understanding" as well as electronically through a become a member page. The latter one is meant to provide access to the various DataPLANT services. At the end the current status of the metadata tool chain involving concepts like the ARC and services like Swate and Swobup were elaborated on.