On the 14th January 2022, the elected spokespersons met for the consortium meeting of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) e.V. association in accordance with the statutes. The meeting took place as a web conference. After welcome and agreement to the agenda, admission of guests and the acceptance of the rules of procedure, the discussion of the consortium guidelines and discussion and resolution on the statement on basic services took the main part of the meeting time.

The consortium meeting adopts the proposed rules of procedure of the consortium meeting by secret ballot with 14 votes in favor. There then follows a brief discussion of the consortium guidelines in which it is first asked whether the consortium guidelines specify how often consortia must hold meetings in accordance with the statutes. The guide does not specify any requirements in this regard, as no obligations are derived from the law governing associations. It is recommended to hold at least two meetings per year. The term of office of the spokespersons of the consortium according to the statutes and the deputies are also addressed. In this case, the guideline currently provides for a term of office of two years, but for the time being this is only to be understood as a proposal that can still be changed if necessary.

A very relevant agenda item of the assembly was the discussion and resolution of the statement on basic services. By way of introduction, the chair of the meeting provides some background information on the topic of basic services and explains the process that led to the creation of the statement on basic services, which was submitted as a supplementary document to the agenda. For the third round of the NFDI calls for proposals, the DFG expert panel basically allowed the application of basic service consortia. In a further step, the process of finding possible such services and possible constellations for basic service consortia was then opened backwards in time. In order to prepare the internal coordination process regarding basic service consortia, two roundtable discussions on the topic of basic services took place in September and October 2021 (the speaker of DataPLANT participated in his role as co-chair of the consortium assembly). In December 2021, the DFG published the schedule for base service consortia. Also in December 2021, the topic of basic services consortia was discussed in the JF Spokesperson:in and the go-ahead was given for a joint statement by the NFDI consortia on basic services. Later in December, a workshop was held to which all funded NFDI consortia were invited. The goal was to create a statement of the consortia that could be communicated and published, which is now available to the consortium meeting for decision and which reflects the position of the current 19 consortia on this topic (the speaker of DataPLANT was involved in the editorial team of the statement). It was agreed that the statement should be published quickly so that the paper can still be taken into account by the various stakeholders involved in the issue and so that the current situation can still be influenced.