ABCD-J Outreach - DataLad Workshop and Hackathon Organized by DKZ.2R

As part of the ABCD-J project’s commitment to promoting collaboration and capacity-building, a free three-day workshop (30 June to 02 July 2025) was hosted at RWTH Aachen University to introduce participants to DataLad, one of the core components of the ABCD-J platform. Jointly organized by DKZ.2R, WiNoDa, NFDI4ING, and NFDI4Objects, the workshop brought together 15 partipants and 4 workshop instructors (Michael Hanke, Adina Wagner, Stephan Heunis, Michał Szczepanik) to equip attendees with the practical skills to act as “multipliers”, or contact persons, for DataLad within their institutions. The interdisciplinary group included a mix of research data management support staff and researchers from neuroscience, medicine, and archaeology, highlighting the broad relevance of ABCD-J’s digital tools and workflows across scientific domains.

The workshop kicked off with a concise introduction to DataLad and key research data management principles, such as metadata, persistent identifiers, modular data organization, and working within ephemeral computing environments. Partipants were then challenged to code along using real-world expamples for hands-on practice and were given the opportunity to relate the workshop material back to their own personal use cases. All workshop materials are publicly available in the Educational resources repository on the DataLad Hub.