DP-Next newsletter October 25

General

We are now just over 1 month into the DP-Next project, so I thought I would share some news and a few updates:

New members of the DP-Next team

The various Work Packages have been recruiting! We are now joined by:

  • Kristiane Beicher: Data architect for DP-Next (working at SDCA)
  • Mikkel Kolind: Post-doc on WP3 (working at SDCO)
  • Jonas Schaarup: Post-doc on WP2 and WP3 (working at SDCC)
  • Hjalte Søberg Mikkelsen: PhD-student on WP2 (working at SDCC)
  • Kristina Hansen: PhD student on WP2 and WP3 (working at SDCF and SDCA)
  • David Vadsholt: PhD student on WP3 (working at SDCN)

A very warm welcome to all of you! We look forward to hearing a bit more about your backgrounds and projects during the launch meeting (see below)

We are still recruiting for some of the other PhD positions, so more new names will follow in due course.

Agreements and contracts

We are making good progress with the drafting of the various versions of the collaboration agreements. The first versions have been sent around to the representatives of all the institutions and review by each organizational legal team will follow in the next weeks.

Launch meeting (online)

I am very sorry we had to cancel our launch meeting on the 3rd of September. We have now found a date in December that suits most people. We will have our online launch meeting on the 17th of December 2025 from 13:00 to 15:00.

In person all-hands DP-Next meeting in 2026

In order to really get to know each other and to discuss the progress in the first year of DP-Next, we want to plan our first all-hands in person meeting for September 2026. As many of the team members from Greenland and the Faroe Islands will probably be attending EASD and traveling via Denmark, we want to suggest to have the meeting on the 24th or 25th of September 2026. We are thinking of an all-day meeting in Aarhus (10:30 to 17:00 followed by a dinner). Could you please let Gunnar know if there are any major inconveniences for either of these dates?

Github

As we mentioned previously, we will be using Github as a joint repository for documents and project files, but also for task/project management. Luke organized a successful introduction to Github session, attended by many. For those who didn’t attend, here are the materials: https://github-intro.rostools.org/

Website

The DP-Next website (https://dp-next.github.io/) contains some very good information, but it is mostly based on the original application we submitted to NNF. Luke has written an extensive outline of the strategy for the Open and Reproducible Science part of WP1 here: https://dp-next.github.io/wp1-ros/, and the WP2 team has written a first version of the Prediction Modeling protocol and published it on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/15410790. I think these are two good examples of how we should be documenting our work in progress, and be publishing it either on our website or on other openly accessible repositories. Please carry on working in this way and if there are any ‘work in progress’ documents, tables or bits of text that you think we should publish on the website, let us know OR preferably: edit the website yourself as a Github branch and submit a pull request. The team of Tech Leads should in due course be able to help you with that!

Who we are

The ‘Who we are’ page on the DP-Next website currently only contains the profiles of some of us. We are looking to include profiles for everybody who is part of the DP-Next team, so if you are not yet on the ‘Who we are’ page, send us your personal profile and a picture, as well as your ORCID ID number. We will work over the next few weeks to update the format of this page and hope that we will all be featured there when we meet online for the launch meeting on the 17th of December.

Discord

For our day-to-day communication, through chat and co-working sessions (possibly also calls and video), we will be using an open source application called Discord. It has some functions like Zoom/Teams and also does what Slack does with messages but without too much clutter. We have created a DP-Next server along with a general channel and channels for each WP. But it’s still very empty in there, as only Luke, Gunnar and I are members. So I want to ask if you could all please:

  • Follow this link to our Discord server: https://discord.gg/Bpyg3NnD6
  • If you are not already a Discord user, you will be asked to create an account
  • You can choose to access Discord via a browser, but there are also (I think preferable) apps for desktops and mobiles.
  • Once you are on the DP-Next server, you can say hi on the ’say-hi’ channel, and one of us will add you to the (private for now) channels for the WPs you work with or want to follow.