Aula Provides Collaborative Support for Researchers, Replacing Slack at the International Autumn School at SFB1187

25.09.2026

For the Autumn School "Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI", participants coordinated their work on Aula instead of Slack, the platform usually used for such events. Aula was developed in the INF subproject of SFB 1187 at the University of Siegen and brings discussions, events and research data services together in one place. On 30 September, we will discuss these experiences with the research data management community at FDM@Campus 2026 in Göttingen.

This image is snaps and collection of Aula being used in Autumn School

This image is collage from the multiple stages of Aula usage by Researchers and Professors in Autumn School Siegen

How do researchers communicate when their work is spread across disciplines, institutions and countries?

Research in SFB 1187 "Media of Cooperation" rarely takes place in one location. Researchers and their project partners work remotely, at different institutions and in different countries, and they collect very different kinds of data. Events such as our Autumn School bring them together for a few days. The communication before, during and after these events, however, usually runs through commercial tools such as Slack. Discussions, files and dates end up scattered across several channels, and research communication takes place on external platforms.

Aula at the Autumn School! For the Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI (Autumn School), held between 22^nd Sept to 25^th Sept 2026 in University of Siegen, we used Aula as the central communication platform for the first time. All the participants worked in a shared Aula space, where they exchanged messages, followed announcements in the activity stream and received reminders for sessions, worked collaboratively in subspaces. Slack, which had usually been used for this purpose, was no longer needed.

What is Aula?

Aula is a collaborative research platform developed by Hina Firdaus in the INF subproject (https://aula.hcis.wiwi.uni-siegen.de). It is based on the open-source software HumHub and builds on services that the University of Siegen already provides. Beyond communication, Aula guides researchers to the right research data services for active data storage and longer term data archiving. It also supports them in working on their data management plans. Many other modules and functionality are still in plan and developing.

Discussion at FDM@Campus 2026

The Göttingen eResearch Alliance hosts the FDM@Campus conference in Göttingen from 29 September to 1 October 2026, with a focus this year on the needs of researchers and on practical topics. On 30 September, Hina Firdaus will lead the discussion session "Sustainable & Collaborative Research Data Management: Exploring Research Practices and Infrastructure Gaps". Together with the participants, we want to explore where RDM is failing everyday in researchers practices, challenges in long term storing and archiving. Our experiences with Aula at the Autumn School will feed into this discussion.

The INF subproject is part of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1187 "Media of Cooperation" at the University of Siegen, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).