Your role: Coordinator / Project Manager

Introduction

The Coordinator or Project Manager ensures that federated learning (FL) projects run smoothly across technical, legal, ethical, and organizational domains. In distributed, multi-institutional initiatives — especially involving sensitive health data — this role is essential for aligning stakeholders, managing timelines and deliverables, and sustaining engagement across the FL lifecycle.

The coordinator often acts as a translator between disciplines: helping legal teams understand technical constraints, supporting clinicians in expressing use case needs, and ensuring developers and data custodians stay aligned. This role also steers sustainability, outreach, and impact strategies beyond the project phase.

Key Responsibilities

• Facilitate coordination between researchers, IT, legal, data stewards, and external partners
• Monitor milestones, timelines, and deliverables across sites
• Support communication, documentation, and shared understanding between roles
• Ensure partner institutions meet their obligations and understand their responsibilities
• Oversee reporting to funders, ethics boards, or governance bodies
• Manage onboarding and offboarding processes for sites and collaborators
• Support sustainability planning (maintenance, reuse, handover)
• Promote the visibility and adoption of FL outputs and tools

Common Challenges

• Bridging gaps in understanding between technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Coordinating schedules and priorities across institutions and time zones
• Maintaining momentum in long-running or low-resource FL projects
• Navigating changes in staffing, policies, or funding
• Aligning different interpretations of FAIR, GDPR, or Open Science principles
• Sustaining infrastructure and collaboration after project end

Recommended Tools & Resources

Project & Collaboration Tools

• Notion, Confluence, Overleaf (collaborative documentation)
• GitHub / GitLab for tracking code, pipelines, or tasks
• Slack, Mattermost, or Teams for structured communication

Project Management Platforms

• Trello, Asana, Jira for tracking milestones and timelines

Sustainability & Impact Planning

• EOSC Sustainability Guidelines
• RDA Output on Sustainability of RDM services

Templates & Resources

• FL participation checklists
• DMP guidance (e.g. DSW, FAIR Cookbook)

Relevant FLKit Sections

• Plan & Govern: role coordination, agreements, onboarding
• Enable Infrastructure: aligning site readiness
• Enhance & Wrangle Data: workflow documentation, validation tracking
• Analyse Shared Data: monitoring training outcomes, publication planning

Training & Further Reading

• ELIXIR Research Project Management Toolkit
• Go FAIR Implementation Networks
• Horizon Europe Guidance on Project Coordination

Solution

• European Data Protection Supervisor’s “Preliminary opinion on Data Protection and Scientific Research”
• BBMRI-ERIC ELSI Knowledge Base contains governance templates and guidance for federated learning projects.
• Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) can help establish governance frameworks for federated learning projects.
• FAIR Cookbook provides step-by-step recipes for data governance tasks.
• TeSS Training Portal offers training materials on data governance and management.

Related pages

More information

Links to FAIR Cookbook

Links to DSW

Training

Contributors