At PSC19 we called upon the expertise and experience of colleagues from across Professional Services to develop approaches to community building.
We started by providing some context for our community building use case. We outlined our team’s work in the areas of Research Data Management, Open Access, Research Citations and Analytics and Open Research. We shared what we’ve done to engage with researchers so far. We explained why we want to continue to develop a community of Open Researchers.
The Mission Model Canvas
Before our event we met with Work in Progress to identify innovative approaches planning to new initiatives. The Work in Progress team introduced us to the Mission Model Canvas which can be applied to initiatives such as ours. So, after our introduction we broke out into smaller groups to apply the Mission Model Canvas to building a community of Open Researchers at Lancaster University.
What did we learn?
The exercise reinforced how creative, resourceful and experienced our PS colleagues are. It’s easy to approach a challenge with ‘blinkers’ on. Getting fresh perspectives from colleagues from a diverse range of backgrounds proved to be uniquely effective. It got us thinking about the many different ways that a PS Division can benefit from the insight of the wider Professional Services community.
A few key take away thoughts
There were so many great ideas and thoughts. Among them: engaging with people beyond the research community, indeed, beyond the university through citizen science initiatives; sharing research projects at LU which have an Open Research dimension at public lectures or at Campus in the City; building links with local business by exploring the value of our research outputs (e.g. datasets) for them and vice versa; presenting at Post Graduate Research conferences; embedding openness in the curriculum at an earlier stage, from the undergraduate or post graduate taught level.
Following up
We feel it’s really important to maintain the momentum we started to build at PSC19. We’re going to look at how we can apply the key take away thoughts from the event in practice.
We don’t want to lose sight of the value to be found in consulting our PS partners either. So, we’d like to invite PS colleagues to join a focus group where we can continue to develop shared solutions to our challenges. We’ll arrange the venue and provide lunch, including the all important pizza which continues to play a big part in our community building journey!
We would also love it if you would join our Open Research mailing list. We use it to share information about Open Research at LU, how we’re working with researchers to maximize the the possibility of potential benefit that our research holds when it’s shared with the openly and freely.
What did our PS colleagues think?
We closed the session by inviting colleagues to share their thoughts about Open Research using Mentimeter please feel free to view all of the feedback.
By Joshua Sendall, Louise Tripp and Hardy Schwamm