Stage 3: Foster and Sustain

In this stage, you increase the diversity of your membership, increase interactions with stakeholders and make your community sustainable. This is also a good time to critically evaluate the effectiveness of your community and to identify opportunities for further development.

3a Governance and decision making

When your OSC is growing and you have more members that engage with your community it becomes important to think about your governance structure and how you can effectively organize your community. Creating a solid organisational structure helps to ensure that new members find their way and that you sustain the knowlegde established within the community.

Organizational structure

Governance is concerned with how your community is organized and how decisions are made. This video provides a short introduction and explains the organisational structures of the Open Science Community Network in the Netherlands (OSC-NL) and the International Network of Open Science & Scholarship Communities (INOSC) as examples.

By the end of this video, you will

• Know a definition of governance
• Know examples of how OSCs can be organized

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Defining a structure for your OSC

Often with local bottom-up initiatives, like the OSCs, someone starts with a great idea and from that a system evolves. While it can be good for things to organically grow, there is also a risk of relying on the people who took initiative in the first place rather than distributing responsibilities and allowing others to step up. It can also be difficult for new members to understand how things are organized and how decisions are made.

We therefore want to challenge you to look at your OSC in terms of the different aims and activities that your OSC covers. In the video below, we propose to work with circles (i.e. a group of people which has the mandate to work together on a particular aim or activity). Organizing in circles follows governance models such as sociocracy and holacracy. These are ways to organize used by groups who aim to have a decentralized, self-steering form of governance and aim for collaborative decision making.

The video gives an introduction to the concept of circles and provides you with pointers how to create an overview of the circles you envision for your OSC. Defining the circles and the roles and responsibilities associated with them will allow you to decouple the work that needs to be done from the people that are doing it.

By the end of this video, you will

• Understand the value of organizing your OSCs in circles and roles
• Be able to start defining circles and roles for your OSC

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If you feel inspired to define circles for your OSC, you can use this Circle Template to draw out the structure of your OSC.

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For each circle you can create a description that outlines the circles purpose and responsbilities. You can use this Circle Description Template.

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Inclusive decision making

In addition to having a clear organisational structure, it is important to consider how decisions are being made in your OSC. Who decides about important things in your OSC? How can you ensure that members are engaged and feel empowered to co-create your local community?

In the video below, we discuss decision making for bottom-up communities. We take the idea of identifying circles in your OSCs which can work autonomously and make decisions within their particular domain. In terms of how decisions are being made, we briefly outline sociocratic decision making and deep democracy methods, both ways of decision making that aim to be more inclusive than traditional majority decision making. While it is beyond the scope of this toolkit to provide extensive training in these methods, we’ll use some of their perspectives to guide you in understanding your OSC and how it could be structured.

By the end of this video, you will

• Understand the importance of a clear decision making structures
• Know examples of decision making forms that focus on inclusivity
• have a framework to think about decision making in your OSC

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You can use this template, to write down how you would like to organize the decision making within your OSC.

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3b. Diversity and inclusivity

Take time to analyze the diversity of your membership. Are you happy with the proportion of newcomers and experienced members? Do you have members in all faculties? The key question here is: Who are you missing? To optimize the diversity of your membership, consider reaching out to new target audiences, such as students, colleagues at Universities of Applied Sciences, or members without a university affiliation, such as citizens, private companies, or members of civil societies.

3c. Institutional stakeholders: policy, infrastructure, and support

In our experience, institutional stakeholders – such as people in leadership positions responsible for policy, infrastructure, and support – are often eager to collaborate with OSCs (see Table 3). Identify those people in your institution and get your community to their attention. Make sure to articulate how we can mutually benefit from one another. We have a shared goal: smooth and effective implementation of OS practices. Communities can serve as platforms for stakeholders to get input from scholars. This input, e.g., on how scholars experience opportunities and obstacles regarding OS practices, is very valuable to them. By being open to this input, community members get the opportunity to influence policy, infrastructure, and support.
There is no easy recipe to expand the influence of your community and the opportunities will depend heavily on your local environment. This is all about networking and lobbying. In our experience, it is more effective (and pleasant!) to focus on people in leadership positions that are already positively inclined towards OS. If you are met with resistance, do not fight it. Explore alternative routes instead. One format that has worked well for us is to organise meetings where the people responsible for policy and infrastructure can interact with community members. Use the newsletter to inform community members of new policies and services, and provide channels for feedback¹.
A partnership that has proved to be beneficial is with colleagues from the university library, who are pivotal for research support. Librarians are often very progressive when it comes to OS and many have been supporting it for years, in particular regarding Open Access and open data. However, our experience is that their knowledge and potential is not often adopted by scholars. One effective way to foster collaboration with librarians is to organise a back-to-back workshop with two speakers: one librarian and one scholar. In our experience, combining the expertise of a librarian with the practical experience of a researcher can be very insightful to both newcomers and expert OS practitioners.

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Stakeholder	Give	Take
Newcomers	Feedback on bottlenecks and boundary conditions	Learn Open Science skills, shape policy and infrastructure (influence)
Experienced colleagues	Share experience	Being able to inspire others (influence), platform to start initiatives (leadership), consolidate Open Science skills (sense of belonging)
Makers of policy and infrastructure	Being open to input (influence)	Well-tested ideas and experiences that help to re-shape or transform ways of working and institutional cultures
Librarians and support staff	Open Science training	Reach an audience interested in Open Science

Table 3. The give and take of target audiences and stakeholders.

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3d. Interactions between academia and society

For science to be truly open, it is important to achieve a relationship of mutual respect and constructive criticism between science and the public. The public is arguably the stakeholder scientists are most accountable to, and their inclusion can benefit science by for instance providing a broader debate or valuable lay perspectives. Views of citizens and scientists often differ, yet science relies on public funding and aims to be a relied upon source of knowledge generation. Open science thus also means engaging the public in a meaningful way, by for instance making science more accessible, providing press-abstracts and summaries for the layperson, involving the public in decisions of what to study (e.g., the ‘Nationale Wetenschapsagenda’ in the Netherlands), and achieving a common goal through Citizen Science. As an OS community, including non-scientific public in the debate, for instance on how to make science available to all, can be a valuable form of feedback for researchers and teachers within the community.

3e. Sustainability

At this stage, you have a growing number of community members and a series of events in place. Now is the time to invest in the sustainability of the community, particularly maintaining and expanding capacity, which is closely connected to acquiring funding.
Communities are often started by PhD students: their energy and enthusiasm can propel the success of the community, but their temporary contracts leave the community vulnerable. It is recommended to either include colleagues with a permanent contract in the core organizational group or include new PhD students that are likely to be around for a longer timespan than the founders. Also, consider expanding your core team. For example, promote Faculty Ambassadors who focus on activities and engagement in their respective Faculties (for example, OSCU has Faculty Ambassadors for all seven faculties, working for 0.1 fte each). You may also want to involve support staff that could support you with organisational tasks, e.g., from the University Library or Research Support Offices.

Knowledge sustainability

Even if you have folks on your team for a longer period of time, it is important to make the knowlegde that you acquire within your community easily transferable. Thinking about how you organize your information can help to ensure that knowlegde is sustained.

Having a strong organisational structure (see Governance above) and ensuring inclusive decision making can help to build a framework where knowlegde is easily transferred. In the video below we discuss how you can develop a strategy for organising the information in your OSC so that knowledge can be transferred easily between circles and to new members.

By the end of this video you will

• have some pointers for creating a strategy to secure knowledge transfer.

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If you want to create an overview of the important information for your OSC, you can use this Knowlege Sustainability template. In the template you can note down the information, the related circle and how the information can be accessed.

💡S1-KnowlegdeSustainabilityTemplate.odt

Financial sustainability

Next to sustaining knowlegde, it is also critical to acquire funding. In the video below, a short introduction to financial sustainability is given as well as some examples of funding that was acquired by communities in the past.

By the end of this video you will

• understand the importance of financial sustainability
• know example projects that have acquired funding for OSC work
• have some pointers for creating a strategy to secure funding for your own OSC

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Of course, it would make life much easier if you were able to acquire funding from the very beginning (and we wholeheartedly recommend you to investigate available options at your local institution). However, acquiring funding is often more effective if you already have a success story to show. It often requires extensive lobbying to convince colleagues who can allocate budget. In this regard, it helps if you can make a clear case for how your community makes institutional policy and projects more effective. The source of the message is also important, so make sure to include members at leadership positions in your requests. Your chances of acquiring funding will depend on the urgency of local and national OS policies and how well you are able to connect with them. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution or strategy, as these circumstances will differ from one University to another. It can be useful to exchange about opportunities with your peers. For instance in the Mattermost environment of the OSC-NL community, a dedicated funding channel was established.

See here an example of a request for funding by Open Science Community Leiden.

If you want to create an overview of funding opportunities for your OSC, you can use this template to answer a couple of questions regarding financial sustainability.

💡S2-FinancialSustainabilityQuestions.odt

3f. Community Building

You’ve brought together a group of passionate people – you’re really hoping to sustain the energy, passion and dynamics of the community and connections. Perhaps you’re finding that as the community grows organically, more and more work is reliant on you, especially administrative, and it’s wearing you out. Perhaps you heard from some initial members that they’re finding their experience no longer rewarding, unless there’s room for them to grow or lead. Perhaps there are emerging disagreements and conflicts between some community members.

It’s important to always ask why – what is the goal of the community, and why do people join/stay? These factors change constantly.

The goals of joining/being in a community can be:

• Co-creation: To work towards something meaningful together/to contribute to meaningful initiatives
• Upskill: to learn new skills/get more diverse experience
• Network: To meet new people/maintain existing contacts
• Support: Emotional support, soundboard ideas, troubleshooting

The goals for your community members can be different, and not listed above! It’s important to find out what they are, to help you design an effective community programme. E.g. the most important goal for most of your community members is to co-create with others–you then design co-working sessions/working groups for your members to join and create something together. If you have a structure in place that allows for the creation of new circles when new challenges or opportunities arise this will allow people who motivated to join forces together within your organisationzal structure.

Mozilla Open Innovation and the Copenhagen Institute of Design distilled 6 major ways of building values together as a community. This is a helpful framework to start thinking about the different possibilities – but again, it goes back to figuring out which of these (or more) are most useful for your community.

To find out what these goals are, you can:

• Conduct 1:1 meetings with new/existing members – these will give you more in-depth insights that often don’t come through via other means, and will make members feel more valued/empowered to make decisions!
• Surveys – less time consuming than 1:1, quick insight into these key questions
• Co-design workshop – connect members in the processed, but requires more planning and effort into design to facilitate an effective workshop

The opportunity to continue to learn and grow with participating in a community is an important incentive to keep community members engaged and active. One needs to consider pathways, from the first instance of engagement (hearing about the community through a friend, or joining a community seminar) to sustained participation in community activities, and potentially leadership.

The mountain of engagement is one of the best frameworks to begin mapping out these pathways, and ultimately, an architecture for participation – it helps you consider how members could move within the different levels of participation, and what would motivate them to move up and become more engaged.

Ultimately, a community is people, which means as members come and go and circumstances and priorities change for members, the programming should change. There’s no perfect programming, and the best strategy is one of build-measure-learn-repeat: actively listen, seek feedback and constructive criticism, reflect, adjust and act accordingly.

3g. Criteria for Success

Here we provide a set of proxies that can help you assess how successful your community is. These proxies, however, only offer a partial view of the work within a community and should not substitute a careful qualitative assessment, e.g., by talking regularly with community members to understand their needs and provide relevant offers with respects to events and communication strategy. Understanding how proxies relate to behavioural change requires additional qualitative investigation to highlight which interactions are most effective. Nevertheless, when used with care, the following proxies can help assess successful community outreach.

Proxy #1: number and characteristics of members

The most obvious proxy for success is the number of members and its increase over time. Make sure to dive into the characteristics of your membership to see whether they adhere to your intentions and strategies. For instance, what is the ratio of newcomers to experienced colleagues in your community? How are your members distributed amongst different faculties? What is the representation across work positions, e.g., PhD candidates, (full) professors, librarians, and so on? While there is no objective target to reach, ask yourself what you consider upper and lower bounds for your community to be self-sustained and achieve its general aims (being a link between OS experts and novices).

Proxy #2: number and type of community interactions

The chance of inspiring engagement to OS practices is likely correlated with the number and type of interactions within your community. For example, how many people attend OSC events? Does attendance vary as a function of the type of event, e.g., more people follow workshops rather than talks? Activity within member initiatives is also very relevant in this regard, therefore it is important to be in constant communication with all the organizers.
It is also informative to consider analytics of website traffic and/or newsletter interactions, for example how many people have opened the newsletters and clicked on particular links.
An additional proxy is social media presence. Many OSCs have substantial numbers of followers and traction on Twitter. Activity on social media facilitates interactions among OSCs and between OSCs and other stakeholders all around the world. However, it is important to consider how much of that information actually ends up at your local target audience. Check the profiles of your followers and those of the people that like and retweet your tweets, to make sure you are not only ‘preaching to the choir’.
Finally, it would be informative to track how many people reached out to members via the website for questions regarding OS practices. We do not yet have procedures in place to systematically investigate the number of professional collaborations born within the community... if you have some ideas let us know!

Proxy #3: number and type of interactions with other stakeholders

Keep track of the formal and informal interactions that you have with local managers, policy makers, and providers of infrastructure and services. Wherever possible, make your role and input explicit and keep track of how much of your input actually gets implemented. This also holds for interactions with stakeholders outside your university, for example at the national and international level. In addition, you can track the number of collaborations you have with the university library and how beneficial they were in motivating scholars to implement OS practices in their workflow.

Besides these proxies, you may also conduct surveys and interviews at regular intervals, to monitor behaviors regarding the adoption of OS practices and evaluate to what extent OSC membership facilitates the transition to openness. Surveys allow you to have a general overview of the type and scope of OS practices within your organization and provide a better picture of the differences among disciplines. However, surveys can be time-consuming, require specialized knowledge, and causal inferences are difficult to draw (e.g., responses might be influenced by social desirability, or other organisational initiatives may have played a role), all caveats that should be taken into account in the planning stage.
So, the take-home message here is: it is difficult to assess how successful your community is. Nevertheless, it is important to keep track of how you are doing, in particular to determine opportunities to steer and develop your communities. The proxies provided in this section, when used with care, can be useful in this regard.

Footnotes

1. There are, of course, many policies and infrastructures that are not determined locally, but rather at national or international level. It is worthwhile to invest time in interacting with relevant stakeholders at (inter)national levels as well. ↩