CONNECT meets Daniel Wüstenberg from the GÉANT Partner Relations team to talk about the Compendium Report in the week of its latest release.
How long have you been with GÉANT? And what does community research involve?
I joined GÉANT’s Partner Relations team as Community Research Officer in 2018. Community research is the equivalent of market research in the commercial sector, so I am responsible for collecting, collating and analysing information from and about the NREN community to provide GÉANT and the NRENs with business intelligence. A big part of this is the yearly NREN Compendium survey and the publication of the resulting data.
Tell us a little about the GÉANT Compendium report and the survey it is based on.
The Compendium is an annual publication based on data from a survey among all NRENs, it presents how NRENs are organised (budgets, number of employees, services offered to their users) and contains data from other parts of GÉANT. It’s a bit of a treasure chest of data about the NRENs. To provide a more complete snapshot of everything that is happening at the NREN level, the report also uses data provided by other parts of the organisation, for example in the sections dedicated to Education (new this year) and T&I.
What’s different about this Compendium Report?
This Compendium is an evolution of the original publication concept. This year we have added a new chapter on Education based on data collected by the new Task Force on Education (TF-EDU), and for the first time we are using non-GÉANT data from external sources, such as publicly available socio-economic data from the World Bank.
Using general socioeconomic data enables us to relate the size of the NRENs, their funding, their activities and the areas they cover, to the size of the country in which they operate. The use of external data plus the knowledge provided by NRENs also helped us to provide a new estimate of users’ numbers, which in most countries are represented by students’ numbers as they are the vast majority of the NRENs’ end users.
Who’s the target audience of the Compendium Report?
I expect that the first readers will be the NRENs who provided the data via the compendium survey as they will use this report to present their work to funding bodies and government organisations to make their case stronger and attract more funding and further support. NRENs will also use it as a benchmarking tool for comparison purposes to other NRENs.
Beyond the NREN community this report could be of interest to market research organisations, journalists, politicians and consultants as it provides an entry point, a summary, a background and a snapshot of our community to the outside world.
When will the 2020 Compendium Report be released?
The 2020 Compendium Report (which is based on the survey carried out in 2019) was officially released on 14 December – however, we have just published a more polished version. The 2021 Compendium is expected in June 2021 and the survey on which it will be based will close this week.
How do you see the Compendium evolving in the future?
As the Compendium report is being retuned, I expect that we will continue to integrate external data and will also keep looking inside the community to identify any new trends. We also want to focus more on the NRENs service portfolio offering. With this objective in mind GÉANT has set up a new Compendium editorial board which includes representatives from across the NREN community.
Members of the Compendium Editorial Board
Nataša Glavor (CARNET, Croatia), Janos Mohacsi (KIFÜ, Hungary), Hank Nussbacher (IUCC, Israel), Alice Thorel (RENATER, France)
Jennifer Ross, Daniel Wüstenberg, GÉANT
Click here to find the latest Compendium Report and happy reading!
