Link Search Menu Expand Document

3.1. Pathway barriers and solutions: Educational

What might be the barriers to engagement for our personas and how can we address these?

Educational

We are expecting (and hoping!) that many of the people who engage with the community will have little experience in the details of open research, processes specific to WIN, or technical aspects of how to contribute to this project. We need to welcome these people into the community, so we can benefit from their fresh perspective on the material created.

Externally curated resources

Where possible we would like to direct to existing resources to fulfil educational needs. These should be carefully curated and relevant to what we are trying to achieve. This material should be easy to assimilate (for example captioned videos) as we should aim to minimise pre-reading as an entry requirement.

Material we will curate from external sources and incorporate into optional introductory educational materials:

  • What open research is, why it is beneficial for the individual and progress in the field;
  • The value and necessity of good documentation;
  • Inclusive teaching and mentoring practices;
  • Communication infrastructure, including slack;
  • Connecting with WIN infrastructure and processes, for example WIN GitLab, WIN IT accounts, WIN VPN, accessing and using the high performance cluster.

Internally generated resources

We expect that some skill gaps (for example contributing to this repository) will need to be addressed as part of this project. An absence of these technical skills is a significant barrier to participation in the project, and also a skill which is broadly necessary in as a part of many open research practices. We also recognise that showing an awareness of the skill gap around contributing to version controlled documentation demonstrates an inclusive environment in terms of technology choices.

Material we will create structured leaning around and guide community members through where necessary:

  • Contributing to online version controlled documentation, using git, markdown, atom and command line, setting up your machine;
  • A template for leading a small team in a hackathon;
  • A template for how to record and report on team progress in a hackathon.
  • Both of the above could be modelled on this resource created for the OHBM Hackathon 2020 Project Issue template