Stage 2: Grow and Inspire

Objectives

1. Attract and Onboard Community Members
2. Facilitate the uptake of OS practices by organizing Events and Activities
3. Stimulate member engagement through Community Building

1. Attract and Onboard Members

Growth is essential to your community. Norms only shift when a critical proportion of the people involved in research is actively engaged. Even if people do not become active members of your community, you may have planted a seed just by showing them the breadth and prevalence of OS practices.

Target audience

When reaching out to new members, it is crucial to identify who you would want to reach out to first. In your Community Statement, you already wrote a short description. Now is the time to go into more detail. Think about your community in a couple of years from now. What would be the ideal composition of your community? Think about the proportion of members along different axis, e.g. disciplinary background, career stage, expertise with OS, job description. In the first section of your OSC Master Plan, you can indicate your target groups and formulate strategies to reach out to them.

Your community needs both newcomers to OS and colleagues who already have experience with one or more OS practices that are willing to share their knowledge. The advantages for newcomers are pretty clear. But what’s in it for the latter group? Pioneers and early adopters, generally proud of their open workflow, often work in environments where their efforts might not be appreciated because it is not common practice. OSCs welcome, validate, and reward their expertise by showing that more people care about improving scholarly practices, thus creating a sense of belonging which can be a strong motivator to stay committed to OS. Moreover, OSCs provide opportunities for leadership roles in setting up local member initiatives, thereby increasing impact and visibility within the local academic environment. This also provides opportunities for members who already actively promote OS to get more traction for their initiatives.

The video below introduces a simple exercise to specify target groups and set-up tailored communication strategies.

** INSERT VIDEO TARGET AUDIENCES & COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES HERE ***

Visibility & Promotion

Expect to invest a lot in the visibility of your community. It needs to be easy for newcomers to find their way into the community, to understand what is offered, how your community is organised and where they can join in. Start spreading the word at meetings and in newsletters of faculties or departments. It can be very useful to ask your initial members to help out with the promotion. Newcomers are more inclined to join the community if they hear about it from colleagues. In our experience, an effective way to attract new people is when current members, preferably at a leadership position, talk about the community or send out an email to their colleagues, research group, department, or faculty, stating that they joined the community and suggesting their colleagues to join as well.

It is also worthwhile to be visible at local events with many newcomers to OS, even when such events are not about OS itself. Try and get a slot to talk about OS and your community, even if it is just a one-minute pitch.

Another option, often easier to accomplish, is to have an information stand at an event, where you can interact with potential new members. It also helps to have a ‘SIGN UP HERE’ desk present at events where newcomers can sign up on the spot.

You can also print posters, flyers or stickers to distribute around the campus, or ask whether information about your OSC can be displayed on information screens (if availabe). Merchandising and gadgets such as stickers, keycords, and water bottles with the community logo can also help attract new members and increase the community feel (if your budget allows).

OSC Website

When you have got the attention of potential new members, either by word of mouth, flyers or other means, the OSC website is the next stop where they can find more information and sign-up to join the community. Having the profile pages of current members visible on the website helps lowering the threshold for people to join, especially if they see some familiar faces. It is important to work towards a diverse set of members in an early stage of your OSC. If someone visits your website and only sees members from a disciplinary background other than their own, they may not identify with the community and be discouraged to join. Moreover, the website is the place were potential members can learn what they can do in the community and how they can engage en contribute.

Onboarding new members

When a new member joins the community, it is important to welcome them and show them around. Sending a welcome email, specifying how they can participate in the community, e.g. with a link to upcoming events, and an overview of ongoing projects in which they can engage, works well. If possible, it is good to invite new members for a coffee where you can get to know them, learn about their motivation to join your OSC and help them get stated. You can include your onboarding procedure in your OSC Master Plan.

Tone of Voice

When attracting new members, it is crucial to have a clear communication strategy. For this, it is key to understand your target audience. They are not you! While OS may be high on your agenda, for newcomers it often has less priority. It is crucial not to be condescending about this. People who are particularly passionate about OS might consider their workflows superior to those of others and express such feelings. Being exposed to such perspectives can alienate newcomers and lead to unnecessary resistance by creating a counterproductive “us versus them” distinction.

Newcomers are more likely to join a community where they can explore and formulate their opinions and doubts. It is therefore critical to strike the right tone. Make sure that in all your communication you are inclusive and respectful. Stress that the OSC is a learning community and that communication is bi-directional: newcomers and more experienced peers learn from each other. Together, they identify bottlenecks and opportunities to make the transition to OS more fun and fluent.

INOSC Collection of Resources: Member Recruitement and Onboarding

Visit the INOSC Collection of Resources for examples of Member Recruitment and Onboarding plans of other OSCs

2. Community Engagement - Inspiring adoption of OS practices

The success of your community in inspiring members to adopt OS practices hinges on the number of meaningful interactions among the members of your community. Your role as a Community Manager is to facilitate such interactions. As each OSC is unique, the formats and tools most suited for your OSC may differ from those of other OSCs. Below we provide list of formats that have proved to be particularly effective for other OSCs. In the INOSC Collection of Resources (REF) you can more detailed description of worked examples, as well as complete Community Engagement plans of other OSCs. Together, these examples and resources may help you to formulate the your own Community Engagement, which is part of your OSC Master Plan.

Membership pages on your OSC Website

Displaying your OSC members on your website is a strong tool to inspire adoption of OS practices. On the website, your members can have their own profile pages, highlighting the OS expertise and what they want to learn. Showcasing your members is a strong tool in norm setting. By demonstrating the prevalence of experience and interest in Open Science practices, we communicate that Open Science is the way forward. When colleagues visit your website and see many (familiar) faces, it signals to them that OS is widespread. As community standards are strong motivators for behavioural change, those colleagues may feel supported or inspired to adopt OS practice themselves. In addition, when the OS expertise of your members is displayed on their profile pages, fellow members may find the right person to reach-out to for support. This provides an easy and low-threshold route to find and contact a colleague when having a question regarding a particular OS topic. This can also facilitate some kind of ‘match-making’ between members who want to share their OS knowledge and members who want to learn about specific aspects of OS. A built-in function that makes these matches automatically would be very useful, otherwise Community Managers could reach out to people with the suggestion to meet. This procedure resemble a bit the format of a dating site, without the romance (but who knows! ;) ).

Events

Almost all OSCs organise events, like presentations, workshops or symposia. These events can include external speakers, but more often, members of the community are invited to organise and provide the content of the events. This is a way to provide a stage for community members to showcase their experience and expertise, and a learning opportunity for attendees.

When choosing the topics of your events, we recommend reaching out to your members for input. What topics would they like to be covered? Make sure to have a diverse set of events, in terms of topics and format. Your members will have different levels of experience in opening up their workflows, and it is crucial to cater to the needs of all. Here we present formats for subsequent levels of engagement with OS practices, from lightweight introductions to in-depth and hands-on workshops and study groups.

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	Lightning talk	Workshops	Study Groups
Goal	Inspire	Engage	Commit
Audience	Open	Interested	Invested
Speaker	Beginner	Intermediate	Expert

Talks are a useful format for introductions: meetings aimed at sharing information to a broad audience. A particular format of talks frequently adopted in OSCs are lightning talks, short talks (5 - 10 minutes) where colleagues share their practical experience with OS practices. Speakers do not need to be experts, they can be just one step ahead of their colleagues on the use of a particular tool or technique. A set of lightning talks can be centered around one specific practice or targeted at a particular audience (e.g., PhD candidates) or discipline. Many of the talks and workshops organised by OSCs are accessible online and open for reuse. We often complement practical experience from peers with in-depth knowledge from librarians.

Workshops are interactive sessions aimed at learning tools that increase openness and transparency. These tools can be specific software or online collaborative platforms. The session host gives a general introduction of the tool and what problem it tackles, followed by hands-on examples and live tutorials that participants can later adapt for their specific cases. Attendees are asked to prepare in advance, e.g., by bringing their own laptop and having relevant software already installed.

In order to attract newcomers, it is beneficial to narrow the scope of a workshop to a particular audience. For instance, newcomers may be more inclined to join a workshop “Open and FAIR data for Economists” than a workshop on Open and FAIR data in general. This, of course, comes with the drawback that many different workshops would need to be organized for different disciplines. If that is not feasible, you can also stick to workshops targeted at the whole university, with the added benefit that they may inspire interdisciplinary insights when people from different disciplines interact with one another.

The fact that OS is not top-priority for your target audience also means that you need to make the threshold for events as low as possible. For example, make sure people don’t have to travel a lot to attend events, e.g., by organising events online, or multiple times at different locations across campus. Having to leave the building can literally make a difference for people to attend or not. Make sure that newcomers can identify and relate to events that you are organising. Try to do everything within your limits to bring your events to the people, both in terms of logistics and topics. Drinks, snacks, and goodies are often appreciated (if your budget allows).

Study groups, mentorship programs and consulation hours A next level of engagement can be achieved in study groups or mentorship programs, or recurring consultation hours where a group of peers work on how to implement a particular OS practice over a period of time, under the supervision of an experienced mentor. Such initiatives not only provide members with a good knowledge basis, but also allow them to connect with colleagues dealing with similar issues, thereby facilitating the quick development of shared solutions and a stronger sense of community.

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Journal Clubs

Journal clubs are regular (e.g., bi-weekly or monthly) meetings in which attendees discuss articles and other documents related to OS. The document to be discussed is communicated in advance, with frequent reminders in the days preceding the meeting. Typically, a discussant prepares a short summary with the main point of the document and discussion among attendees is encouraged. The discussant can be one of the organizers, an attendee, or one of the authors of the document examined during the session.
A number of OSCs have adopted the journal club format of ReproducibiliTea for their communities.

Newsletters

A newsletter is an efficient way to reach a large number of people and inform them on OS news and events. OSC newsletters are typically well read, with about 50% of the subscribers opening the newsletter and 10% clicking on items in the newsletters (based on the newsletters of OSC Utrecht). Make sure to keep them short and appealing and try not to overload your subscribers with emails (once a month is sufficient).

INOSC Collection of Resources: Community Engagement

Visit the INOSC Collection of Resources for examples of:

• Community Engagement Plans
• Worked examples of successful events or formats
• Tooling used by OSCs to facilitate engagement and communication

3. Community Building

Organizing events and providing means of communication is essential for your community. But there's more to it. Now that 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. The strength of a community depends on the contributions of its members. Members can increase the number and diversity of the activities organised within the community. They can also ease the organisational burden on the shoulders of Community Managers.

In order to stimulate members' engagement, it’s important to always consider why people are part of your community.

The goal of being in a community can be:

• Co-creation: To work towards something meaningful together
• Upskill: to learn new skills
• Network: To meet new people
• Support: Emotional support, soundboard ideas, troubleshooting

The goals for your community members could also be different, and not listed above. It’s important to get a better understanding of what they are in order to design an effective community programme.

To find out what these goals are, you can:

• Conduct 1:1 meetings with 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 and 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

To facilitate members to be active in your community, you can set up 'member circles' - a topic described in more detail in the section 'Foster and Maintain'. Member Circles are typically tailored for a smaller subsection of the community, and focus on specific tasks within your community.

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, as described by Mozilla, is a framework 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.

In the video below, we diver deeper into the different roles and levels of engagement within your community. We reflect on what you can do to stimulate members to play a more active role in your communities.

INSERT VIDEO MOUNTAIN OF ENGAGEMENT

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.