On June 8th and 9th, 2026, the RAISE Suite consortium gathered in Athens, Greece, for a highly productive 1st Plenary Meeting, after the project’s kick off meeting. Hosted by OpenAIRE at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Department of Informatics and Telecommunications), the two-day event brought together our project partners to align on technical progress, pilot methodologies, and strategic next steps.
Strengthening Collaboration Across the RAISE Suite Ecosystem
The plenary meeting marked an important milestone in the project’s journey towards enabling FAIR data from collection to exploitation. Over the course of two days, partners reviewed the project’s progress, aligned ongoing work across technical and non-technical work packages, and discussed the next steps for advancing the RAISE Suite infrastructure.
The first day opened with welcome remarks by representatives of OpenAIRE and AUTH, followed by a project progress update and dedicated sessions on collaborative requirements elicitation, pilot methodology, and the evolution of the machine-actionable Data Management Plan (ma-DMP).
A key focus of the discussions was the role of the ma-DMP as a central element of the RAISE Suite approach, supporting automated, FAIR-by-design research data management across the data lifecycle. Partners explored the user flow, technical requirements, ma-DMP elements, and the use of ODRL to support machine-readable policies.
From Requirements to Real-Life Pilots
The agenda also placed strong emphasis on the project’s real-life pilot activities. During the WP5 session, AIN and pilot partners presented updates and progress from the project’s real-life cases, highlighting how RAISE Suite will be tested and validated across different research domains.
The meeting also included discussions on the Open Call methodology from SIT, which will play an important role in engaging external use cases and expanding the project’s impact beyond the consortium.
In the afternoon, partners focused on dissemination, exploitation, sustainability, and EOSC integration from VIL, including discussions on Key Exploitable Results, collaboration opportunities, and the project’s wider positioning within the European Open Science ecosystem.
Interactive Workshops and Technical Demonstrations
The second day focused on project management, governance, user experience, and technical developments. Sessions included updates on WP1 project coordination, a General Assembly meeting, and an interactive UX workshop dedicated to the RAISE Portal.
A demo and discussion session gave partners the opportunity to explore the portal’s current progress and exchange feedback on its functionality, user interaction, and future development. Additional technical sessions addressed the portal’s security advancements, the RAISE Suite Machine Actionable DMP, SDK and Central Hub, as well as the RAISE Streaming Node and Certified Node by UOM and CLP.
These discussions are central to the project’s mission of creating an integrated infrastructure that supports researchers in managing, sharing, processing, and reusing research data in a more automated, trusted, and FAIR-compliant way.
Moving Forward
The completion of the 1st RAISE Suite Plenary Meeting represents an important step in consolidating the consortium’s shared vision and preparing the ground for the next phases of development and implementation. By bringing together expertise from Open Science, research infrastructures, data management, software development, pilots, exploitation, and EOSC integration, the meeting strengthened the collaborative foundations needed to deliver the RAISE Suite ambition: supporting researchers with tools and services that make research data easier to collect, manage, share, and exploit according to FAIR principles.
RAISE Suite will continue building on the outcomes of the Athens plenary meeting as the consortium advances towards its upcoming technical releases, pilot activities, stakeholder engagement actions, and wider contribution to the European Open Science Cloud ecosystem.