Funding, Sustainability, and Governance

Discussions about funding, sustainability, and governance of any e-infrastructure service tend to be culmination points of the tensions between bottom-up and top-down, static and dynamic, and prescriptive and descriptive approaches. Data management brings in additional challenges due to the time aspect. While a computing centre or network technology might be considered obsolete after a few years, data management requirements often extend decades or even centuries into the future. Funding commitments need to be made for long periods of time, and decisions about sustainability and governance models could be seen as setting a precedent that ties down parties for years into the future. At the same time, it is anticipated that the amount of data being produced will continue to exceed the capacity of the managed (curated and otherwise maintained) data services, adding the need to discuss prioritisation of the different datasets.