Breakout: Community management, working groups and events#

Prompts#

  • Do we want industry involvement? If so, how to encourage/enable that?

  • How can WGs align with organisations like DARE UK?

  • How to ensure that working groups (WGs) are output oriented (i.e. deliver something within a timeframe)?

  • How to prioritise WGs and their outputs? In a sense, how to groom the community backlog?

  • How should future meetings be run?

Notes#

How do we move these events forward

  • Can we really do more than 4 events a year? Is it feasible?

  • Working groups should have more operational meetings in between

  • Working groups should self-organise

  • There is the option of having 4 events but WGs/people can organise specific things like focus groups or other ways to get informed or receive feedback on stuff

  • All calls / meetings other than the quarterly “all community” call should be driven by the WGs

What’s the balance of frequency so this doesn’t fade away, but also doesn’t take all people’s time who already have jobs?

  • Maybe some regularly public facing content and repository, available to the community. In terms of WGs people will align with they like the most and are passionate, cannot force them

  • We need to be careful that this community is not just the voice of those for whom this is actually part of their day job

  • The community cannot be only the WGs

Are these the right WGs, they came defined by what needed to be done to get started.

  • A WG for open TREs should be created soon, but not right now due to everyone being busy?

  • Initial groups are a bit “meta” so having e.g. an open source TRE group might make it easier for people to engage as part of their daily role

  • A working group on open source TRE would also align well with what DARE UK will hopefully fund.

  • An open source TRE WG involves collaborating on the tech and information governance (IG) we use, this feels like a core part of our reason for being

Everything, even this meeting, needs to be delivering something. Because it is easy for communities to diverge/fade but if there is something written then it is easier to hold on to it and for the future people to look at records and continue the work

  • +1 on meetings having outputs. A written report / blog posts from working sessions would be great. Some of these could become bigger pieces of work for WG?

Could there be an IG working group, an open-source TRE WG, a funding & sustainability WG, a community management WG?

  • IG should be a WG. Maybe it’s got more resistance / less ecosystem culture in favour of it, but it’s even more important than the tech

  • On information governance, going forward there might be lots of people interested in it that might rule themselves out if they perceive it as too much tech focused.

  • Don’t be afraid of pushing forward, because without outputs there will be no community. Just make sure you invite people and strive to hear them.