It’s the season of celebrating, connecting with colleagues and creating memories. It’s also the perfect time to look back at the past years and cherish the path we’ve walked together. As for ENGAGE.EU, we have recently closed our first 3 years of partnership, and we are moving forward with 4 more years and an enlarged alliance. In this blog, We, James Small and Rianne Strijker, would like to share with you some of our successes and highlight some of the key achievements of our task: from ideas to strategy, towards an online platform. And we're happy to shine some light on what's next for the research community.
From ideas to a strategy for networks and communities
How can you collaborate with 7 universities to create a unified alliance? That was the main question that ENGAGE.EU started off with. The focus for our task was research communities, with the goal to ‘Strengthening research through comprehensive ENGAGE.EU networks’. A team comprised of members from each partner university came to a three tiered strategy:
- Leverage ongoing research collaborations, events and activities (create awareness).
- Co-create research events and stimulate network building around these.
- Develop new research collaborations, conferences and exchange opportunities.
As a team, we co-created, hosted and shared multiple events (online and in-person) over the past years, such as the Early-stage research conferences in Sofia, the online roundtable on Privacy and the PhD workshop in Toulouse. These events brought together a wide range of young and more senior researchers from many disciplines. These meetings not only helped to establish the value of ENGAGE.EU for researchers, but also led to many of them becoming our first ambassadors and enthusiastic community members.
From a strategy to a community platform
On April 18th 2023 we launched our community platform. And how could it be otherwise: this too has a collaborative history. Our international team helped us compile a list of the first design features and functionalities to meet the needs of our research communities. It became clear that there was a great deal of work ahead. So, we took several important next steps: to recruit an experienced community manager and identify software developers to co-create a prototype.
A customer-centric design approach led us to organize focus groups of researchers, from diverse institutes and disciplines. They helped us answer questions like: ‘for which projects would you use a platform like this’. Based on their feedback, and many new suggestions, we worked on an improved version of the prototype and shared and tested it during the ENGAGE.EU conference in Tilburg in November 2022. Examples of improvements are single-sign on-options like OrcID, the addition of methodological expertise to the profile pages and the introduction of ‘teaching opportunities’. The architecture of our online platform reflects the many conversations we have had with many of you, our colleagues. It has been a quite complex project with some unexpected challenges, such as security and GDPR requirements to take into account. It was a challenge to keep the website user friendly and user driven, but with lots of filters and a notification system behind the nicely designed webpages.
Part of the success of this journey is definitely about the engagement, enthusiasm and support from our “early adopter” community members, around 60 of them. Their involvement and ideas enabled us to debug and improve the community platform, they shared and promoted the platform with colleagues, helping to make it the success that it currently is. After the launch, our community has continued to grow, with now around 350 registered researchers.
What’s next?
Our goal is to support the development of an ENGAGE.EU research community, with a mission to continue to support your research through collaborating with international colleagues. Therefore, as you will see on the platform our first question is ‘how can we help you?’. We aim to become even better at creating awareness for collaboration opportunities, events and interesting research in the coming years. We intend to create more thematic communities in which international colleagues inspire each other, and collaborate on societal challenges. We also want to support your own initiatives, so feel free to reach out to us whenever you have a good idea. We’re looking forward to continue working with you!
On behalf of the Task 3.3 team,
Seasonal greetings from
James and Rianne