The task area Community Clusters pursues two major objectives and is structured into six subdivions or measures. As mentionend above, it first and foremost serves as gateway to the research engineering communities and their needs. Furthermore, the Community Clusters are themselves adaptable to enable the inclusion of communities that are currently less present in NFDI4Ing, or beyond the scope of the engineering sciences alone. The measure “Initialisation of communication services”, lays the foundation to achieve this objective.

Secondly, the task area Community Clusters works on measures to disseminate the developments and results of the other NFDI4Ing task areas, such as services and best-practices, into the research communities. One central topic in this regard is RDM-related training for engineers, from students and PhD students to research assistants working at higher education or non-university research institutions. The derived tasks are addressed by the measure “Education”. Additionally, this means intensive user and community involvement in the development processes, achieved by means of an agile approach as described below.

The Community Clusters gather cluster-specific information about RDM-related practices and requirements and direct their specific user communities to available solutions within NFDI4Ing. Developed services are tested by the research communities and disseminated via application and training. Emerging new needs trigger the development of solutions in the archetype task areas. The measures “Activation and collaboration” and “Participation” are designed to ensure vast community coverage and intensive engagement. Since RDM will be normative to some extend, NFDI4Ing works on standardisation together with the engineering community in academia and industry, nationally and internationally, within the consortium and across the consortia of the NFDI. This task is addressed in the measure “Standardisation”. As an appropriate academic platform to exchange ideas, the “Journal of Research Data Management in Engineering Science” is currently in development. Responsible for the journal and its operation is the measure “Journal”.