Shane Rounce (Unsplash License)
We are inviting members of the open research community to participate in two curriculum co-design workshops to shape the Seeds to Systems training programme.
These co-design workshops are intended for individuals who have experience sustaining open research communities, projects or initiatives for 1+ years or longer, whether fully volunteer, paid, or some combination.
In Seeds to Systems, we use sustainability in a broad sense. We are interested in how different initiatives understand what they need to continue, adapt, or transition. This may include funding, but also governance, documentation, partnerships, and other pieces of infrastructure.
📌 We particularly encourage expressions of interest from people who may want to stay involved in future Seeds to Systems activities as trainers, experts, or mentors.
Accessibility microgrants of up to 100 USD are available to support participation in the workshops.
These workshops may be for you if you:
These workshops may not be for you if you:
Please complete the expression of interest form by June 28.
The form includes questions to help us understand your experience with open projects. It also allows you to indicate interest in one or both workshops, as well as in future Seeds to Systems activities.
Participation in the workshops is limited, as we aim to keep the sessions focused and interactive. We aim to balance participation across levels of experience, geographies, disciplines, and types of projects (e.g. data, software).
What tools and strategies are most impactful in securing funding across diverse organisational and individual contexts?
Building on previous activities, this workshop will test a set of guiding questions and case study templates designed to surface leverage points in the journey toward project and community sustainability.
The session will include short presentations by a panel of invited contributors. Participants will then work in breakout rooms with specific leverage points, map how these appear in practice, and reflect on the actions and conditions that make them possible.
Initial panel presentations will be recorded and shared online. Breakout discussions and activities will not be recorded.
Participants will receive guiding questions before the workshop to reflect on their own project or community journey, and will be invited to share reflections during breakout discussions.
July 8, 14:00 - 16:00 UTC (check your timezone)
What visions do we have for a more sustainable open research ecosystem, and how do we build pathways for those visions to become possible over the next five years?
The workshop will explore community visions for a more sustainable open research ecosystem, and identify potential interventions that could help move communities toward those visions, whether through training, research, policy, or other pathways. The insights will help us understand where a training and mentoring programme can make a meaningful impact on project sustainability.
Participants will share a short description of their community vision in advance. These visions will be organised into a shared board for collective discussion to identify key conditions that need to be in place and connect them with concrete actions their communities are already taking or could take. Activities will not be recorded.
July 21, 14:00 - 15:30 UTC (check your timezone)
Participation requirements: These workshops are designed to be interactive. Participants will be expected to have stable internet connection for the duration of the session, and the ability to speak or type interactively.
Contributions: Participants will be named as co-authors in workshop outputs, including templates and workshop synthesis materials. Participants will be given the chance to review content before the pilot cohort launch and to be acknowledged as contributors to the curriculum. Workshop outputs and co-developed curriculum materials will be shared CC-BY.
Research ethics: Whilst Seeds to Systems does have a research component, these workshops are purely interacting with professionals around their work-related non-sensitive expertise. Under OLS’s Research Ethics Policy, this type of workshop does not require research ethics approval.