Knowledge Hub Blog

The Knowledge Hub Reading Club is a community-driven initiative that brings members together each month to talk through a shared set of readings. A look back at 27 sessions—and ahead to what's next.

On Thursday 26 February 2026, the FRDN Knowledge Hub convened for its spring Community Day at the Antwerp Management School. The morning focused on Open Data, Open Software and Valorisation, while the afternoon turned to Effective Communication with and to Researchers. Together with our invited speakers, 22 KH members took part in a full day of interactive peer learning!

On 17 November 2025, the Knowledge Hub gathered at Arteveldehogeschool for a lively Community Day focused on the European Health Data Space, with an introduction to Common European Data Spaces more broadly. In the afternoon, we showcased our educational game currently in development.

Summary of the KH Community Day on Thursday 12 June 2025, where we addressed data curation processes in practice, FAIRVault, and digital preservation strategies. 

Summary of the KH Community Day on Tuesday 18 February 2025, where we focused on the ethical, legal and safety aspects of RDM, and enjoyed the Braem building at the VUB campus.

Which educational games are currently available for RDM support staff to teach FAIR (meta)data management to researchers? Which characteristics make an educational game effective? Can we make our own FRDN-labeled game? In this blogpost, you can find a recap of our Community Day in Leuven on Thursday 28 November 2024!

Reuse of qualitative data? Yes, but how? This blogpost describes the results of our workshop, guiding you to the topics discussed, with all materials available for independent exploration.

How we experienced the Open Science Festival 2023

- by Jolien Berckmans & Nicky Daniels (Hasselt University) - 

While many mainly focus on filling out the front-end of a DMP, Nele Schouteden (& friends) created a presentation of the DMP business process to make it easier for everyone involved to have more understanding.

FRDN lunch session on how different research institutions in Flanders support their researchers in developing data management plans (DMPs).

Do we rather opt for the standard repository choice in a particular research community, even if this repository is non-European / not EOSC-federated, or do we give precedence to the European alternative, even if it is less known in the research community, keeping the European data sovereignty strategy in mind? 

Metadata seems to be the most difficult aspect of research data management for researchers to describe in a data management plan, let alone implement in their research. So at  the FRDN Knowledge Hub lunch session on 27 January 2022 we looked at the basics of how and why metadata are applied to data for different purposes and for different types of data, and how as data stewards we can advise researchers about metadata.

An ELN or Electronic Lab Notebook is the digital version of a laboratory notebook and so much more. Researchers use it to collaborate on scientific experiments and to document the research process systematically. Done with unreadable lab notebooks, done with endless page by page searching when a colleague has noted something down. An ELN is a favor to your future self and your collaborators.

Good advise from Nele on how data stewards can decide and define terminology.

History of the Knowledge Hub from its start-up in early 2021, until a series of community building events two years later, shaping the Knowledge Hub as a community of practice with defined identity, purpose, values, success criteria, rituals, shared experiences and incentives. The purpose of the Knowledge Hub as a community is to share knowledge, experiences and practices amongst peers and to do something with it. The community brings tangible outputs that are immediately applicable to support data stewards, and helps its members to increase their confidence and efficiency and bring a better service for researchers.

FRDN members attending International Data Week 2023: A Festival of Data, 23–26 October 2023, in Salzburg share their highlights.

FRDN Knowledge Hub community day at the Hasselt Old Prison, with train-the-trainer session on organising good workshops, brainstorming on fun training ideas and building the KH Identity.

“As Open As Possible, As Closed As Needed”. Experts in IP, privacy, ethics and GDPR explained how to address this in practice, followed by interactive break-out sessions with discipline-specific use-cases.