🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the strategic challenges confronting HDRL across key domains—including metadata management, user experience, infrastructure, impact assessment, and community sustainability—by designing and implementing a large-scale participatory strategic planning process. Through an organization-wide convening, the initiative integrated over 30 lightning talks and more than 50 discussion topics contributed by 40+ members, leveraging collaborative deliberation, collective voting (324 votes in total), and thematic clustering analysis to systematically distill seven core strategic themes. The approach innovatively combines multidimensional stakeholder engagement with data-driven decision-making, culminating in an actionable strategic roadmap that provides HDRL with a clear, consensus-based vision for its modernization and long-term development.
📝 Abstract
HDRL held its first HDRL wide strategy meeting in January 2026, pulling in a majority of HDRL member staff and selected HDRL grantees. Just over 40 people attended with a few more online to listen to over 30 lightning talks presented by their colleagues and leaders, participate in several breakout and group discussions, and cast 324 votes on over 50 strategic topic ideas contributed by the attendees. The many ideas generated by attendees can be grouped into seven themes which describe the overall breadth of discussion at the meeting. These themes included:
Metadata, Standards, and Semantics Discovery, Search, and Recommendation Modernizing HDRL User experience Modernizing HDRL Staff experience Modernized, Scalable, and Dependable Infrastructure for Compute and Storage Metrics and Impact Assessment Community Engagement and Sustainability
Considering the gathered information and the interconnections between the prioritized ideas we concluded that several strategic areas for action exist. This document provides an overview of contributed materials and post meeting strategic analysis.