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DUO Governance Process

A community of practice

The best way for DUO to actively meet data sharing needs and opportunities is by fostering an active dialogue between the GA4GH and its community of implementers. GA4GH encourages implementers to share their experiences in implementing DUO including limits encountered, endorsements of its existing terms and structure, and successful adaptations and extensions. A range of implementers’ experiences may be considered in determining changes to the DUO. Fostering such a forum for implementers to learn from each other and assist one another in policy and technical approaches to implementing DUO. The DUO community will strive to produce a brief annual report of user feedback and implementations for discussion during GA4GH plenary meetings.

Formal change request process

DUO was developed through years of research, piloting, and community discourse amongst numerous global stakeholders, after which it went through the rigorous GA4GH open standards approval process. DUO accepts formal change requests. Users making formal change requests should provide appropriate justifications and supporting evidence from real-world use cases (see Criteria below). Contributions from the global scientific community (in addition to and beyond GA4GH) are welcome. Change requests should meet a similar standard of assessment and consensus as with the initial version of DUO.

Criteria for Change Requests to DUO:

  • Changes and modifications to DUO should be use case driven.
  • Change requests should include:
    • a concise description of the use case
    • datasets to which the changes/new terms would apply
    • contact details for a representative of the project requesting the change

When Change Requests are made DUO leadership will:

  • Changes and requests are to be publicly posted on our GH tracker
  • Share proposed changes affecting existing DUO terms via the mailing-list and GH notifications to keep the community informed of latest developmentsMake efforts to directly engage with specific groups when we know they have a stake in a specific aspect of DUO. Attribute via ORCID contributions of the community, such as annotation properties at the term level referring to the submitter etc.

DUO Principles used to Assess Change Requests::

The following criteria reflect the philosophy behind DUO and should be considered when considered changes to DUO:

  • Purpose: changes should promote responsible AND effective data sharing (i.e., integration and re-use of scientific resources).
  • Simplicity: the simplicity of DUO makes it easier for users to understand the meaning of the terms, their range, and the relationship between them. It also reduces fragmentation of terms across scientific resources. Changes that increase complexity should outweigh risks to user understanding or fragmentation of rules.
  • Legitimate Interests: new terms should address a common and legitimate ethical interest (e.g. of a data subject or data provider), that align with the spirit of data sharing. Terms that essentially block data sharing should not be codified into data sharing infrastructure.
  • Interoperability: changes should not confuse the meaning of existing terms, and should not be a breaking change undermining interoperability of existing implementations.
  • Common Use Cases: Changes should be demonstrated to affect two or more implementation contexts (e.g., across multiple driver projects and/or countries). Use cases should go beyond identifying datasets that cannot be described by DUO, but rather they should be a demonstrated implementation of a tagging and matching system successfully using the change.
  • Machine-readability: Changes should preferably reduce the need for open-text and the burden for human interpretation.
  • Efficient use of GA4GH resources: the GA4GH relies on limited professional and volunteer resources to maintain standards.

Governance Committee

In cases where significant numbers of Driver Project representatives and active DU community members disagree on proceeding with change requests, the ultimate decision will rest with the DUO Governance Committee (DUO GC), composed of the DU, RI, and overall DURI leads. The DUO GC is responsible for accurately understanding and adjudicating on the change requests within two weeks of receipt, in order to serve GA4GH Driver Projects and maintain fidelity to the DUO Principles.