How to build team science and how to collaborate with not so obvious others?
People illustrations by Storyset
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In recent years, there has been an increased perception of the potential for interdisciplinary and collaborative research to address complex societal and environmental needs. It is also becoming increasingly clear that a diversity of roles and contributions is needed to drive progress and success in research and innovation. The knowledge sector is now looking towards a team-based approach bringing together more overtly diverse team members with specific skills in funding, research design, data analysis, data management, software development, research ethics, dealing with business, communications, etc.
What does this new thinking mean in practice? What skills are needed to successfully carry out research today? How are different teams composed, managed and rewarded? Can research morph from a sector where only ‘star researchers’ are appreciated to one where everyone, including professional support staff, is recognised for their skills and contributions?
This toolkit helps put together and organise a workshop that explores what a dream research team might look like and discuss what this might mean for how research is supported, managed and rewarded.
The toolkit is for anyone who would like to facilitate discussion and raise awareness about diversity of roles and contributions to research in an inclusive and interactive way.
The toolkit is designed as an online interactive document that is available at https://research-dream-team-toolkit.readthedocs.io/
The toolkit provides guidance and useful suggestions to design a workshop on building research dream teams in a tailored manner to your audience, and to organise it in an easy and efficient manner.
It is composed of the following sections:
- About the toolkit: Description of the toolkit.
- Goals and possible outcomes: Goals and possible outcomes of the workshop.
- Practicalities: Information about specific organisational aspects related to this workshop.
- Agenda: An actionable and re-usable workshop agenda, with some practical tips, which you might use to support your own workshop.
- Scenario: A possible fictional research project (a scenario) to support the discussion on the composition of the ideal research team, with some insights to help you develop alternative scenarios to suit your needs, and guidance for facilitating the discussion.
- Activity: A step by step explanation of the workshop activity.
- Slide Deck: Presentation template which you can use to introduce the workshop, the scenario and the breakout activities
- Activity Sheet: Printout copy of an activity sheet that each breakout group can use to facilitate their discussion.
You can use the toolkit simply by following sections and applying the provided tips and suggestions.
If you decide to run a similar workshop, we would love to hear from you. We invite you to share your own experiences and materials with the community. We all benefit from each other's resources and experiences. Through collaboration we can keep improving these materials.
That's why we chose to host the toolkit on GitHub to make sure that anyone can easily build on and further develop the toolkit. You can contribute as little or as much as you want. You can start by making a comment on the resources, sharing your observations and experiences, improving the materials we have already made available, adding your own materials (for example, your own slides, new scenarios, modified agendas) or starting a discussion.
The toolkit is written in reStructuredText, which is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plain text markup syntax. Sphinx is used to generate the documentation. You can find useful information about how to use reStructuredText and Sphinx at Sublime and Sphinx Guide.
You can find the content of the toolkit at the source folder of this repository, which is a good starting point to see what you can contribute.
To build the documentation from the source files, you can simply use the
make script:
make clean
make html
The built of the latest version of the documentation is available at https://research-dream-team-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
(In alphabetic order)
| Cath Cotton | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, delivery of the workshop. | c.m.cotton@tudelft.nl |
| Kenny Meesters | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, delivery of the workshop. | k.meesters@gmail.com |
| Maria Cruz | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, delivery of the workshop, design of the kit, development of the kit, team leadership and organisation. | m.cruz@nwo.nl |
| Marta Teperek | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, delivery of the workshop, design of the kit, development of the kit, team leadership and organisation. | martateperek@googlemail.com |
| Melanie Imming | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, design of the kit, development of the kit, team leadership and organisation. | immingimpact@gmail.com |
| Natalia Romero Herrera | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, delivery of the workshop. | n.a.romero@tudelft.nl |
| Serkan Girgin | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, delivery of the workshop, design of the kit, development of the kit, Sphinx implementation. | s.girgin@utwente.nl |
| Yan Wang | Conceptualisation, design of the workshop, delivery of the workshop, design of the kit, development of the kit, team leadership and organisation. | y.wang-16@tudelft.nl |