2Participate

2Participate engages with the community as broadly as possible, from students to professionals and service providers to top scientists through four interrelated measures: Pilot studies, an Incubator Lab, educational materials and resources, and establishing an NFDI4Earth Academy. These measures guarantee that the development of NFDI4Earth is entirely driven by the community’s needs and requirements and takes into consideration that the uptake of FAIR principles happens at different speeds. 
2Participate aims to equally attract those practitioners and researchers who may, for the first time, work on making their data interoperable and accessible, as well as those who aim to couple the latest data analytics tools to a wide array of heterogeneous data sources and explore novel avenues of science. In this spirit, we attract all sub-branches in the Earth system sciences. 2Participate also aims to leverage novel approaches, methods, and technical solutions for ingesting research data into the scientific workflow. 2Participate identifies and tests essential building blocks for a sustainable research data infrastructure that is prepared to integrate the full workflow from data collection all the way down to data exploration across domains so that reproducible analyses become possible and natural. Active scouting for novel developments is likewise an essential element via the Incubator Lab. It is therefore no coincidence that 2Participate is also responsible for education: on the one hand, the next generation of Earth system researchers and practitioners should be prepared to deal with the NFDI4Earth infrastructures; on the other hand, this 2Participate supports integration of the latest developments in their research activities. Hence, we need to enable the learning fundamental data management and exploitation concepts and enable future researchers to couple any relevant set of data (streams) to high-end analytic tools. 
With this big picture in mind, 2Participate invites the community to explore research paths that were not anticipated by the time data were created. This requires that new participants are flexibly able to be integrated into the NFDI4Earth team via the open calls along the entire life of the project. This element is essential for both challenging, but also attracting Earth scientists and practitioners.