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Since 2020, UKRI/STFC’s Scientific Computing Department (SCD) have developed several remote-first public engagement activities, drawing on its long and rich history of delivering face to face public engagement and outreach, as part of the wider STFC programme. With COVID19 restrictions lifted in the UK, STFC has been able to resume in-person public engagement, both on site and in public places. However, this has not meant a complete return to exclusively in-person engagement, but rather, recognising the clear benefits of remote engagement to meeting our strategic public engagement aims, STFC has produced a blended programme for 2022/23, with a mixture of in-person, remote and hybrid events. This paper presents how the remote activities have evolved since their initial creation, how the remote activities have become part of a blended programme and how the in-person activities in place since before the pandemic have been improved as a result of developing the remote activities.

UKRI/STFC’s Scientific Computing Department (SCD) has a long and rich history of delivering face to face public engagement and outreach, both on site and in public places, as part of the wider STFC programme. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, SCD was forced to abandon an extensive planned programme of public engagement, alongside altering the day-to-day working methods of the majority of its staff. SCD had to respond rapidly to create a new, remote only, programme for the summer and for the foreseeable future. This was initially an exercise in improvisation, identifying existing activities that could be delivered remotely with minimal changes. As the pandemic went on, SCD also created new resources specifically for a remote audience and adapted existing activities where appropriate, using our evaluation framework to ensure these activities continued to meet the aims of the in-person programme. This paper presents the process through which this was achieved, some of the benefits and challenges of remote engagement and the plans for 2021 and beyond.

Public Engagement (PE) with science should be more than “fun” for the staff involved. PE should be a strategic aim of any publically funded science organisation to ensure the public develops an understanding and appreciation of their work, its benefits to everyday life and to ensure the next generation is enthused to take up STEM careers. Most scientific organisations do have aims to do this, but very few have significant budgets to deliver this. In a landscape of ever tightening budgets, how can we develop a sustainable culture of PE within these organisations? UKRI/STFC’s Scientific Computing Department present how we have worked to embed a culture of PE with the department by developing our early career staff members; highlighting the impact PE makes at the departmental and project level; and linking PE to our competency framework. We will also discuss how our departmental work interacts with and complements STFC’s organisational-wide PE effort, such as making use of a shared evaluation framework that allows us to evaluate our public engagement activities against their goals and make strategic decisions about the programme’s future direction.

GOCDB is the official repository for storing and presenting EGI and WLCG topology and resource information. It is a definitive information source, with the emphasis on user communities to maintain their own data. It is intentionally designed to have no dependencies on other operational tools for information. In recent years, funding sources and user communities have evolved and GOCDB is developing to meet the resulting new requirements, such as allowing more programmatic updates to the data within GOCDB. We will explain the roadmap for developing GOCDB and the motivation for the changes on that Roadmap. As GOCDB, and the team supporting it, has evolved, we have re-examined the underpinning architecture for GOCDB. We will set out the changes we have made as a result.

This paper reviews the prototype dataset accounting developed during the EGI-Engage project and how it could be used to complement the view that the WLCG has of its datasets. This is a new feature of the EGI resource accounting system that will enable storing information on dataset usage such as who has accessed a dataset and how often. The new REST interface used for retrieving usage metrics from the EGI DataHub is described as well as further work that is required.