ospark digital bootcamp

Opening notes...

In March, I signed up for the OSPARK digital bootcamp led by the Digital Research Academy in partnership with Open Life Science(OLS).

Since I actively contribute to/work on open science communities/projects, and I am also working on my SSI fellowship, learning how to improve in science communications is an important step.

The goal of the bootcamp was to improve open science communications, and different ways folks working in these roles could share about the work they do with or without so much complexity, but to their expected target audience, and get results.

The bootcamp was modelled after a cooking class, with "recipes" sent to us twice a week on methods to try out in our comms. We could choose written, audio, video or all three of the media types as our comms output for our communities. I chose audio, as I do have a podcast on open source that is being resurrected. This year, I'd dedicate a season of it to open science and related topics.

We had a workbook to practice with, and got assigned "buddies" as accountability partners. You choose the frequency of your check-in with your "buddy", with my buddy and me choosing to meet once a week.

To end the bootcamp, we had a physical 2-day in-person workshop at Queen's University, Belfast.

I would take a break here to tell you the school is beautiful. It was such a great location to host us for the workshop, and I am thankful to the organisers, Drs: Bethan Iley, Joyce Kao, Yo Yehudi, and Heidi Seibold.

Now, about the physical conference...

For day 1, we had an unconference, discussing topics we had sent in ahead of time, and improving on them. My unconference topic was "Making complex topics easier to understand, without losing information".

Since it was a large group of people with different topics, but overlapping ideas, we grouped related topics and worked together.

A picture of a bunch of paper and sticky notes hung up on a wall. It shows the different topics that have been merged together, and the sticky notes/paper with markers on them show the brainstorming the team has undertaken.

My group - team Otter (aka The Awesome Otter) - focused on how to communicate Open Science concepts, methods, and topics in a way that would be easily consumed by the public, researchers, and general audience alike. We focused on disseminating this information through visual content, and we split into two teams as it was a large team. One part to work on the strategy, and the other to work on the visual guide that the strategy team would come up with.

For Day 2, we began with a Case Study Exercise, analysing a fictional research project that had a Comms gap, and explored various strategies to solve the problem:

Brainwriting - start without talking, just write things down
Bad Ideas Only - reverse brainstorming, think of how to make the situation worse
Rolestorming - thinking about how you would approach it from different roles (e.g. senior researcher, PhD student, Gandhi...)
Starbursting - think of questions you'd want to ask, then come up with answers/solutions for those questions

My team had the Bad Ideas Only approach, and it was such a great (and fun!) way to come up with solutions. Thinking of the worst possible outcome, walking backwards, then prioritising the best possible approach to take. I really loved the exercise.

We ended day 2 by finishing up the unconference topics from the previous day. You can find the materials we came up with in my team here: Open Science Communities: Content strategy and visual content creation (an Otterly awesome guide).

Closing notes...

I am really grateful to the DRA and OLS team for the bootcamp and the value gotten from it. From conversations with other teammates, I learned a lot more about what others are working on and different forms of science communications.

I would be implementing this knowledge into the different open science communities I contribute to - like the Turing Way, my SSI fellowship project, and my work.

Some other random information I liked and picked up:

One of us is working on a Galaxy Datasets: https://glade.elte.hu/
Check out the Open Science Training Hub: https://scilifelab-training.github.io/open-science/2505/
Someone else is working on ocean data collection - Regenerative Blue Economy: https://ceanapse.org/
What a Monograph is!

Until next time, enjoy this group photo of us all from the DRA x OLS OSPARK Bootcamp.