SATRE Collaboration Cafe 1st August: Principles and implications
Introduction
SATRE’s 9th Collaboration Cafe was held on the 1st August 2023. To register your interest for future Collaboration Cafes, please fill in this form.
The focus of this Café was principles and implications. Accompanying the requirements of the specification are a set of governing principles that any TRE following the SATRE specification should follow, and implications of these principles.
They are structured by:
- Statement: A statement summarising the principle
- Rationale: Justification for why the principle is important
- Implications: Any consequences teams should think about as a result of adopting these principles
In this Collaboration Café, we brought the community together to discuss our first draft of these principles on four key areas: usability, maintaining public trust, observability and standardisation
Setup
Breakout rooms were created for each of the four principles above, with each room tasked with:
- Discussing the thinking behind each principle
- Reviewing our draft principles and amending wording. For the Café, we specifically left the implications section blank, so the community could think about implications openly
- Discussing whether there are any key principles missing that we should include
Discussion summary
Below is a summary of the key thoughts from each breakout room.
Usability
- Diversity of users: There are many different types of users of TREs, with different skillsets, backgrounds and experience. TREs therefore shouldn’t be too strict in their requirements for knowledge of specific tools and methods.
- Onboarding: Usability should also consider the educational resources and time available to users to become familiar with particular environments.
- Holistic usability: Usability extends beyond the infrastructure, and into documentation, standards and, for instance, the SATRE reference architecture itself
Maintaining public trust
- Transparency: Maintaining public trust requires transparent processes, operating procedures and uses of public data
- Public input: Having the public input into the research process not only builds public trust, but also helps research projects ensure they are working on problems the public cares about — ultimately leading to more impactful research.
Observability
- Respecting privacy: There is a balance of what activities are useful to observe and record in a TRE, and what is invasive on researchers’ privacy
- Different requirements for different personas: There should be considerations for who needs observability of what. How do these requirements differ for researchers, TRE operators, and auditors, and what benefits do they get from observing different activities?
Standardisation
- Public standards: As a baseline, TREs should adhere to public standards
- Sector-specific design: There was conversation around whether TREs should be structured around standards specific to the area they operate in, e.g. handling health data. This is an ongoing consideration
Next steps
The conversations in each of the breakout rooms were, as always, rich and extremely important! The SATRE team has incorporated these discussions into the next open iteration of these principles, and additional ones, on GitHub.
Anyone can contribute to these conversations, either via GitHub or this Microsoft form (no login required)!
The overall issue for principles is here. Issues for specific principles are here:
Collab Café principles
Other principles
For any questions about the glossary or the SATRE project, please get in contact with us via satre-contact@dundee.ac.uk.
And to register your interest in any future Collaboration Cafes, please fill in this form.
