After our first community call, we asked the attendees to complete a short, anonymous survey to let us know what they thought about the event. Here’s what we learned…
On Friday 30th April, we hosted our first community call based on the theme, ‘Building a Culture of Collaboration’. The one-hour long event welcomed 30 attendees from eight research institutions to celebrate the six month anniversary of the 4TU.ResearchData community.
Watch the event and read more.
Following the event we asked the attendees to complete a short survey to let us know what they thought about the event. Only 8 attendees completed the survey, however, their responses have helped us gauge representative views and opinions so that we can improve our next community call.
Survey responses
We used the survey tool, Spotler, to ask the following questions:
How would you rate the event?
All survey respondents rated the event as either ‘Good’, ‘Very good’ or ‘Excellent’.
What did you like about the event?
- The diversity of topics covered during the call and that every aspect of the community was mentioned.
- The inspiring presentations from the community-led working groups.
- The guest lecture by Malvika Sharan from the Turing Way.
What did you dislike about the event?
- Not enough time for Q&A and discussion among participants.
- The event presented information for research data management supporters and would be less interesting for researchers.
What did you think about the duration of the event?
- All respondents reported that the 1 hour event was ‘about right’.
What can we improve for the next community call?
- More interaction with the participants since it is interesting to know more about the attendees.
- Allow the participants to ask questions themselves rather than writing in the chat and having questions read aloud by the chair. However, this can be challenging under limited time.
- Include topics that are more targeted towards researchers or maybe split the community call into two parts (for research data management supporters and researchers).
- Organise a themed discussion around a certain topic of interest.
Do you have any suggestions for future themes or topics?
- More detailed discussions with speakers related to the topics the community-led working groups are focussing on.
- Creating data management standards.
- Creating inclusive communities across gender, ability, ethnicity, etc. and, how to have those discussions as teams.
Lessons learned & next steps
Only 8 community call attendees completed the survey out of a possible 30. We sent the post-event survey one week after the event which was too late. Next time, we will send the survey as soon as the event ends so that the programme will be fresh in the attendees’ minds, and their opinions and experiences will be clear and easy to remember.
After evaluating the survey responses, we feel that the community prefers to participate in an interactive event that facilitates discussion around a specific topic. This topic should be of interest to research data management supporters and researchers. With this in mind, we are asking our community members to upvote the next community call topic using the poll feature in our Slack workspace.
“Based on the community call survey results, upvote your favourite topic to be discussed during the next community call.”
- How to write FAIR and Reproducible Code
- Privacy and GDPR in research
- Engagement and Education: Creating data management standards
- Creating inclusive communities (and how to have discussions about diversity, equity and inclusion).
As the summer vacation is coming soon, we aim for our next community call to take place during the first week of October. More to follow soon!
If you would like to help organise 4TU.ResearchData’s next community call, please get in touch! We would love to hear from you and welcome you to the organising committee!
Written by Connie Clare (4TU.ResearchData)
Cover Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
Clementine images by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay