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Stage 3: Foster and Sustain

Objectives​

  1. Provide mapping of relevant stakeholders and strategies to engage them
  2. Formulate the governance structure of your OSC
  3. Take the neccesary action to warrant the sustainability of your OSC
  4. Implement meaningfull means to monitor the impact of your OSC

1. Stakeholder Engagement​

It is important to realise that your OSC does not operate in isolation. It is embedded in an eco-system of stakeholders and actors, each with their own goals and interests. By engaging with these stakeholders, opportunities may arise to make your life as a community manager easier.

Stakeholder Mapping​

Stakeholders can be mapped at different levels, for example:

  • Local Stakeholders
  • National Stakeholders
  • International Stakeholders
Local Stakeholders​

In our experience, local stakeholders – such as people in your institution responsible for policy, infrastructure, and support – are often eager to collaborate with the OSC. Identify those people in your institution and get your community to their attention. Make sure to articulate how you can mutually benefit from one another. Often, you will have a shared goal: smooth and effective implementation of OS practices. Communities can serve as platforms for stakeholders to get input from their members. This input, e.g., on 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. Opportunities will depend strongly 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 usually works well is meetings where people responsible for policy and infrastructure can receive input from community members.

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. 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 often not 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. Combining the expertise of a librarian with the practical experience of a researcher can be very insightful to both newcomers and expert OS practitioners.

National Stakeholders​

While stakeholders at the local level are likely to be the most relevant for you OSC, it is also good to be on the look-out for national developments regarding OS policies, services and infrastructures. For example, in the Netherlands, following input by local OSCs on the national OS strategy, national investments have been made to support all Dutch OSCs.

International Stakeholders​

The ambition of OS is also shared at a global scale, as seen in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science or the mission of the International Science Council. From a European perspective, Open Science continues to be a 'hot topic' in large scale funding programs such as Horizon Europe, and becomes more and more important in hiring and evaluation practices (e.g. CoARA. While engaging with stakeholder at the international may be less relevant for your local OSC, it can be very beneficial for (inter)national networks of OSCs. For example, INOSC has successfully participated in two European projects (AURORA RI and Skills4EOSC) which was mutually beneficial for the projects and the network of OSCs.

The OSC Master Plan contains a section dedicated to mapping stakeholders at the local and (inter)national levels and help you to think about how to set-up and maintain meaningful realtions with these stakeholders.

INOSC Collection of Resources: Stakeholder Engagement Plans​

Curious how other OSCs have mapped and engaged with relevant stakeholders? Visit the INOSC Collection of Resources for examples of Stakeholder Engagement Plans!

2. Governance and Decision Making​

When your OSC is growing it becomes increasingly important to think about how you can effectively organize your community. Creating a solid organisational structure helps to ensure that new members see how they can be involved and that everyone knows how things are decided in the community. This also helps to sustain the knowlegde established within the community.

Organisational structure​

Governance is concerned with how your community is organised 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

🎥 INSERT VIDEO 1-Governance

Defining a structure for your OSC​

Often with local bottom-up initiatives, like the OSCs, someone starts with a great idea. 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 organised 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. A circle is 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

🎥 INSERT VIDEO 2-DefineYourStructure

If you feel inspired to define circles for your OSC, you can use this 'Circle Template' in your OSC Masterplan to draw out the structure of your OSC and describe the purpose and responsibility for each circle.

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

🎥 INSERT VIDEO 3-DecisionMaking

You can describe the process of decision making in your OSC in the section 'Governance Plan' in your You OSC Master Plan, which contains some guiding questions to get you started.

INOSC Collection of Resources: Governance Structures​

Curious how other OSCs have organised their governance? Visit the INOSC Collection of Resources for examples of Governance Structures!

3. 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, OSC Utrecht 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.

3.1 Knowledge sustainability​

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

Having a strong organisational structure (see Governance above) and ensuring inclusive decision making can help to build a framework where knowledge 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.

🎥 INSERT VIDEO 4-KnowlegdeSustainability

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

3.2 Financial sustainability​

Next to sustaining knowledge, 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

🎥 INSERT VIDEO 5-FinancialSustainability

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 institution 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 OSC 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

4. Monitoring​

Say you have your community all set-up: people are joining your community. Activities are being organised. How do you know is your are 'doing it right' or if you have to adjust your strategies? And, how do you showcase the impact of your community? That's where monitoring comes into play. And while monitoring your OSC may not be straightforward or easy, it is crucial for the success and sustainability of your OSC.

Monitoring starts with identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Qualitative Goals (QGs). KPIs are quantitative indicators associated with the goals and aims of your community. It is crucial to make sure they are aligned with your Community Statement. You can categorize your KPIs and QGs according to the sections that have been covered in this Toolkit.

Here are some monitoring examples that may be relevant to your community:

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 members 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 among different faculties? What is the representation across work positions, e.g., PhD candidates, (full) professors, librarians, and so on? Who is still missing in your community? 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.

The chance of inspiring engagement to OS practices is 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? 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.

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 and to collect qualitative feedback on the success of your community. Surveys also 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. This can be as easy as sending out a short feedback form after an event, which is a great way to collect information on the impact of your activities. However, more extensive surveys can be more 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.

We also advise you to 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. You can also save any feedback you received from people who you interact with, to monitor the impact of these interactions.

The take-home message here is: it is difficult to assess how successful your community is. KPIs 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. Therefore, it is important to keep track of how you are doing with regards to these needs, in particular to determine opportunities to steer and develop your communities and to showcase the impact of your OSC. A great way to do so is by storing any indicidental evidence that comes up during the years, like photos from events you arganised, or the Open Science Success Stories that were collected when you handed out OS Prizes. You can also ask people to share a quote about their experiences within the community etc. Such examples can often showcase the impact of your OSC better than 'just numbers'.