Research Infrastructure Roles Hackathon
Arielle Bennett, Jennifer Ding, Anne Steele
2022
Zenodo
It is rare that successful collaborations occur without a person, or group of people, taking on the work of structuring participants' interactions, facilitating work, and supporting the impact of the project. These people may be either volunteers or paid, depending on a project's funding, size, length, and number of organisations involved. They're called research infrastructure roles because the work they perform is primarily to support the work of researchers, although research can also be a
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... gnificant proportion of these roles as well. The specifics of these roles will vary but can include handling administrative work, managing data storage, stakeholder engagement, community management, communications, software engineering, events coordination, and a lot more. People performing these types of roles come from varied backgrounds, but will often have some research experience, although not necessarily in the field they are now working in. At the Alan Turing Institute, our Tools, Practices, and Systems (TPS) programme is developing several of these roles including: Community Managers and Research Application Managers, alongside the more established Research Software Engineers and Data Stewards. Because these roles may exist in other forms and under other names, it can be challenging to identify best practices, build collaborative relationships, and capture the impact of these roles across different institutions and fields. We can think of no better place than the Big Team Science conference to start a larger conversation about research infrastructure roles and build connections and community for those working in these new positions. We propose a 90-min Research Infrastructure Roles Hackathon, similar to The Turing Way Book Dash which our team organises biannually, as an interactive exercise for conference attendees to meet, discuss shared challenges, and co-create documents capturing their personal experiences and best practices as an open resource for others to reference as they develop out similar roles at their [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.7307368
fatcat:vkuzsuu5fzbo3lb7s7dymuaf3a