Last week fellow Mozilla Science Labber Abby Cabunoc-Mayes and I attended the FORCE 2016 conference in Portland, Oregon. The organization behind the conference is focused on improving communication around research and scholarship.

I chose to attend the “By Researchers, For Researchers” workshop on how to promote scholarly communication at academic conferences and out of this workshop blossomed a new idea for communication around open data.

THE CHALLENGE

As open data advocates, one of our frequent struggles is trying to get researchers interested and engaged in open data. People talk about it being a good idea and there has been a lot of work around developing systems to support it, but we still have difficulty communicating the real life benefit of open data to the research community. It takes more time to make data open, sometimes more money, and many just don’t understand why they should bother.

THE WORKSHOP

The workshop focused on reaching researchers at their disciplinary academic conferences instead of trying to pull them into ours. The primary exercise of the workshop put participants into small groups to brainstorm actionable innovative ideas to engage researchers at these conferences. I lucked into a group including Charlie Rapple, Raja Cholan, and Eva Montenegro.

We started out acknowledging the barriers around engaging researchers at academic conferences:
1. Pre & post conference workshops frequently require extra $$ to register for the workshop and / or travel costs for staying an extra day.
2. There is a need from researchers to justify spending time & money at a workshop “not directly related” to their research.
3. If communication is included in the body of the conference (through sessions, panels, etc) there is competition from concurrent sessions that are “more relevant”.

OUR SOLUTION

Our group came up with an idea we are calling Open Data Open Mic (other suggestions, welcome). An “open mic” (short for “open microphone”) is a live event where audience members are invited to stand up in front of a microphone and share something with the rest of the audience. Usually you will see this method used for poetry, music, or comedy. Our idea is to use it for storytelling. Basically, we want to take our message about open data out of the formal conference presentation formats and make it part of the informal discussion throughout the conference.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Stake out a space in the exhibit area of the conference.
   Originally we were thinking we could ask conference organizers for a table in a public space (preferably near a coffee cart) but a representative from an agency that hosts a couple conferences a year I talked to suggested conference organizers should WANT this and provide the exhibit space for free.
2. Identify champions to tell their open data success stories.
   Find a few highly regarded researchers in the discipline of focus for the conference that are willing to share success stories around open data. During breaks and lunches schedule one or two of those champions to present their stories in 3-5 minutes in the exhibit space. We will request permission to record so these stories can be saved to an online forum post-event.
3. Invite others to tell their stories.
   After the champions tell their stories, open the mic and invite others to tell their open data success stories in 3-5 minute chunks. We’d also ask permission to record these.
4. Make these stories available through a website that links to other open data resources.
   This online forum would provide access to not only the recorded stories but promote other open data resources such as events, training resources, organizations, tools, etc.

The end goal is to make the positive results of open data part of the informal conversation that takes place at academic conferences and to drive researchers to resources that provide opportunities to encourage and engage in open data practices.

Because of the workshop, this idea is focused on doing this at academic conferences, but really it could be done anywhere! At Study Group meetings, Open Science Meetups, stand-alone workshops, library events… you name it! Raja even came up with the idea of developing an app that makes it easy to record and share your open data story.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED

I talked to one conference organizer at the event who was so interested he offered to host us at his next conference.

What are your thoughts on this idea? Do you have ideas to extend it or make it more effective? What conferences should we target? Are you a conference organizer that would be willing to host this? Are you a researcher who would be willing to share your open data success story? Have you tried something similar in your community? What did you learn from the experience?

Let us know!

• Create an issue on our Open Data Open Mic repository
• Tweet us at @MozillaScience or @shefw
• Comment below.

We’d <3 to hear your thoughts and have you join in!