Open Communities: Working together for research impact

Welcome to this short talk on open communities and open research. To explore this topic, we’ll draw links between open research, public engagement, and the theme of impact. We’ll look at how an open and collaborative way of working can sometimes help bring about rapid positive change. We’ll look at how a specific kind of community, called a “community of practice” builds the skills of its members. Then we will turn to several current examples of public-facing research projects. The talk concludes with some practical suggestions for working with communities, and pointers to places where you can get involved.

Whatever your interest in open research may be, it’s worth remembering that we do open research — and, indeed, most kinds of research — in communities. Sometimes we might focus on “research communities” or “disciplines” — often, communities of experts. Other times, we might focus on the people in our neighbourhood, or on stakeholder groups who could be distributed internationally. As discussed in the video on “Participatory Research”, some open research practices make the boundary around a given research project or team more permeable, inviting relevant people to get involved with the research. In this talk, we will deal more with the way open research percolates out into society at large. Since the open research agenda is largely concerned with ensuring the maximal public benefits from research, this is a crucial topic.

Defining open communities

It’s helpful to explain what we mean by ‘open community’ in connection with open research. An ‘open community’ gives everyone within that community the opportunity to be involved in activities related to a shared interest. Many communities in the open research space are open regarding materials and methods, and participation-friendly governance structures, helping people to get involved. A central point in this talk is that similar aspects of openness can help all kinds of communities — not just communities of researchers — get organised around problems that matter to them.

“The societal impact of open science”

One way to think about the role that open research can play in communities is to have a look at the evidence surrounding its broader societal impact. In a recent review by Cole and colleagues, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, most of the sampled studies that attest to some form of societal impact due to open research practices focus on the impacts of citizen science. Indeed, as we covered in another video, citizen science frequently has impactful aspects “baked in” — for example, in terms of learning impacts for participants. By contrast, in all of the sampled papers, the benefits of Open/FAIR data were only ever discussed in speculative terms! The authors suggest that this is because the impacts of Open Data are not so easy to measure. This reaffirms something we’ve touched on in other talks in this series. Making data “open” typically is not the same as making that data concretely useful (or even usable). The concept of an ‘open community’ introduced earlier suggests two further hurdles to overcome. In order for open data to achieve measurable impact through re-use firstly, other people need to find the data interesting in some way. Secondly, they need to have ways to get involved in activities related to that data.

‘Intelligent openness’ and ‘public engagement’ for impact

This hints at links between “intelligent openness” and ‘public engagement’. The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement defines the latter term as follows:

Public engagement describes the myriad of ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education and research can be shared with the public. — https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/introducing-public-engagement

NCCPE further highlights that “Engagement is by definition a two-way process, involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit.” Similarly, ‘intelligent openness’ involves meeting people where they are at. Let’s have a look at a straightforward example, showing how open dialogue can turn an existing community into a site of shared inquiry and problem solving.​

“Rural Self Help”: An anecdote from Sri Lankan activist A T Ariyaratne

The late Sri Lankan activist A. T. Ariyaratne told a story about how he visited a rural village and asked the villagers what their biggest problem was. This was an example of public engagement at the village scale. Indeed, everyone was welcome to participate in the discussion. It quickly emerged that the biggest problem the villagers faced was repairing their water storage system. They explained that they had already been corresponding with the government for 15 years, trying to get the matter taken care of, and in all that time nothing had happened. Ariyaratne asked them to think together about what it would take to solve the problem themselves. By talking it over, thinking it through, and getting organised, the villagers were able to identify a more direct solution to the problem. Indeed, they managed to carry out the necessary repairs themselves in one day of hard work! Ariyaratne shows that this story highlights three criteria for effective community problem solving: (i) community members need to have a thought which unites them, (ii) techniques within their capacity, and (iii) an organisational structure under their control.

The whole process was ‘intelligently open’, first in an open dialogue and then in a shared problem solving process using methods that were understandable and effective for everyone involved.

Communities of practice as places to build capacity

In the scenario just described, once they had thought through the problem, the community could address their water storage problem in one day of hard work. Sometimes, though, the problems that need addressing are not one-off — and the best way to approach them is by gaining new skills. In the terms used by Etienne Wenger-Trayner and William Snyder:

“Communities of practice exist to develop members’ capabilities, and to build, and exchange knowledge. People self-select to participate in the community. The community is held together by possession, commitment, and identification with the group, and with its domain of expertise. The community lasts as long as there is sufficient interest.”

Let’s turn to some examples of open communities.

Example 1: A Developing Community of Practice around open research training

The first example is explicitly being developed as a Community of Practice. The UK Reproducibility Network is currently running a series of train-the-trainer courses that are intended to help embed open research in institutional practice. People who have attended these courses are expected to go on to deliver training in their home institutions. They will also be invited to join a Community of Practice for Open Research Trainers (https://www.ukrn.org/ukrn-community-of-practice/). The Community of Practice provides a space where peer-to-peer interactions help participants get better at sharing open research practices. The degree to which people are involved can vary: it’s perfectly OK to just come along to some talks, but attendees are also invited to get more involved, for example, by sharing presentations on what they are doing locally with the rest of the group. This illustrates the principle of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ that is associated with communities of practice. Metaphorically, as people get more involved, they move from the periphery of the group into the core.

Example 2: Science Together

Science Together is an initiative here in Oxford, which actively seeks the involvement of researchers and support staff from both Oxford University and Oxford Brookes, as well as local organisations. “Through facilitated workshops researchers are able to connect with local communities as a starting point to identify and develop funded, collaborative projects that help these communities to overcome a challenge or seize an opportunity.” Incidentally, the “science” label in the name of this project is something of a misnomer. Current projects range from assessing the impact of community hubs and dance, to creative projects including rap and legally-sanctioned graffiti, to co-production of research with young people, on to the co-design of a platform for healthy eating. Science Together is not primarily organised as a community of practice, but rather as a space for using existing research skills in new contexts, and finding routes to impact by working with members of the community who aren’t based at one of the city’s two universities. The accompanying video on “Research Diversity” elaborates on the potential benefits of this way of working.

Example 3: “People-driven solutions”

“People-driven Solutions” is the title of a 2024 report by a multi-party research consortium which tackled topics related to Child Labour in South and South-Eastern Asia (or CLARISSA for short). As in Ariyaratne’s example, this project describes an outside team coming into existing communities, and working to turn them into a space for inquiry. In this case, their aim was to understand how to alleviate — or better yet entirely avoid — the harms that children working in hazardous occupations can experience. To do this, the research team worked to create an ‘open community’, inviting children involved in this work as well as other stakeholders — such as their employers — to engage creatively in finding alternatives. The authors stress that in this kind of work, it’s not appropriate or even realistically possible to push through a “solution” that is imagined in advance. Instead, there is a continuous re-assessment of inputs, outputs, outcomes and impacts. To do this, they used a high-level “learning loop”. A lesson from this way of working is that a rigorous review process can bring a new level of openness and clarity to any ongoing research programme — or indeed any programme of work in which research plays a part.

Get good at facilitation

Each of these examples required one or more people to take on the role of facilitator. Kim Cameron and David Whetten outlined five “P’s” for running effective meetings — these can be adapted naturally as a framework for facilitating other kinds of collaborative activities.

• Purpose: What is this going to accomplish?

• People: Ensure that the relevant people are invited, with responsibilities relevant to the purpose.

• Process: Managing the group dynamic, including ground rules, giving people a chance to get to know each other, and keeping things moving along.

• Plan: A suitable space, a suitable agenda, and an appropriate decision-making structure

• The fifth “P”, Perspective, is used to evaluate whether the meeting was, indeed, effective.

A more general perspective-building technique is the “After Action Review” — as used, for example, by the CLARISSA team. Some people leave this item out and shrink the list to four, “P’s” — but if you’re working to build and evaluate impact, it’s really important. NCCPE makes some further guidance available on “How to evaluate public engagement projects and programmes”, and similar considerations apply within open research projects.

Some people refer to a sixth “P”, suggesting that the outcome of the group effort will be an actionable Product, though in general it may be some other outcome or impact. A key theme throughout this talk has been to keep track of these impacts. You can get further help thinking in through research impact matters from the Knowledge Exchange and Impact team within RIE.

Get involved

Links to examples from the video

University of Oxford, MPLS Division: Science Together: Oxford Researchers and Communities UK Reproducibility Network: UKRN Community of Practice for Open Research Trainers CLARISSA: People-driven Solutions: An Introduction to Facilitating Deep Participation for Systemic Change Through Systemic Action Research Programming

Additional links

UKRI: What's in it for me? The benefits of public engagement for researchers. National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement: How to evaluate public engagement projects and programmes

References

Cameron Neylon (2011). Re-use as Impact: How re-assessing what we mean by “impact” can support improving the return on public investment, develop open research practice, and widen engagement. Presented at altmetrics11. https://web.archive.org/web/20210412193143/http://altmetrics.org/workshop2011/neylon-v0/

Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder. (2000) Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier. https://hbr.org/2000/01/communities-of-practice-the-organizational-frontier (embedded infographic: “Snapshot Comparison”)

The Royal Society (2012). Science as an open enterprise. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/sape/2012-06-20-saoe.pdf

Cole, N. L., Kormann, E., Klebel, T., Apartis, S., & Ross-Hellauer, T. (2024). The societal impact of Open Science: a scoping review. In Royal Society Open Science (Vol. 11, Issue 6). The Royal Society. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240286

A. T. Ariyaratne. Organization of rural communities for group effort and self-help. In Food Crisis Workshop, Los Baños, Laguna (Philippines), 7-9 Feb 1977, pages 23–24, 1977. Digitized copy archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20150308150744/http://www.sarvodaya.org/about/philosophy/collected-works-vol-1/rural-self-help

David A. Whetton and Kim S. Cameron. (2011). “Conducting Meetings” (Supplement C) in: Developing management skills. (pp. 652-659). Pearson Education. 8th Ed.