Our Work

Why is this project being undertaken, and more importantly, what will it acheive? How do you determine if this project is a success? It is also helpful to review the target applications of the project, who it will impact, or what specific operating procedures the work sector requires. The purpose of this question is to get a sort of “check list” of items that we can evaluate our assistance against. It helps us to better understand the purpose the community will play in accomplishing the goals set out by the project (and what new goals they may bring).

Are you looking to increase your peer group to allow for more review? Are you trying to share your work to allow others the opportunity to build on it independent of you? Are you trying to expand your partnership with the private sector or other universities? The freedom allowed by open source licensing can protect the university from liability when you work open source. Moving into the open can be daunting, but we exist to help facilitate that development.

Open Academia is distinct from the conventional academic world in that ownership & coordination happens on a per-project level. Communities formed around projects are the key drivers of change instead of institutions. These communities have a variety of governance structures and demographics. Some are close-knit and homogenious, others are broad, federated, and heterogenious. Understanding who your ideal community is made up of is integral to planning on putting yours together.

A community supported project is only as strong as the system in place to support said project. As such, considerations must be taken to make the contribution process as smooth as possible. Do contributors come through word of mouth? Are their contributions supported by some sort of organization? Or are they handpicked from applicants to supply information and contributions to further the project? Understanding the process of contribution for each type of community member is necessary to make that process effective. It also helps us to contrast their current contribution methods with ideal or planned methodology, and work to get the two as close as possible.

Anyone involved in the project is a stakeholder, our clients, their funding agencies, anyone contributing to the project. Ultimately, those governing the project should be accountable to all stakeholders involved. Defining stakeholders is key to understanding who is involved, their needs/wants, and how to effectively govern your project.

Anyone that adds something to the project is considered a contributor, even for the slightest changes or recommendations. They could be posting on a forum, submitting bug reports, building the website, building the roadmap, supporting users, and troubleshooting the code. The only people who in a community who aren’t contributors are the people who never change anything and simply observe.

Those users are still important as they are beneficiaries of the open project as a whole, being as entitled to the benefits as anyone else.

Another way of posing this question is to ask “why do people want to contribute to this?” What is the specific reason why someone would want to provide input, data points, contribute to research, or contribute their valuable time to your project. This will also help you better understand them, your most valuable stakeholders.

From the outset, assume contributors want to contribute. What must be done is to make individuals who would wish to be contributors aware of the project, and more importantly, aware of what they can do to share their own contributions. Make it easy to do so, with as simple a process as possible.

For each of your defined stakeholders, how would you imagine them becoming a contributor? How would they find the project? What sort of contribution would they make? What would that process look like? Would they make a second/third contribution? Why? Would they take further responsibilities and leadership roles? What would that process look like?

These pathways are to serve as a baseline for our community development strategy.

For the ideal pathways theorized in our previous question, how does that differ from the experience of contributors you’ve interacted with so far? What roadblocks or issues have prevented those theoretical pathways from being completed?
By identifying the points of failure in the contributor pathway, you can begin ideating solutions to those failures.

Why is this project being undertaken, and more importantly, what will it acheive? How do you determine if this project is a success? It is also helpful to review the target applications of the project, who it will impact, or what specific operating procedures the work sector requires. The purpose of this question is to get a sort of “check list” of items that we can evaluate our assistance against. It helps us to better understand the purpose the community will play in accomplishing the goals set out by the project (and what new goals they may bring).

Perhaps the project leads are being contacted for assistance often, and it’s taking time away from their project. Or perhaps potential contributors are washing out of the project due to an onboarding process that is either non-existant or more difficult than necessary. We offer support in creating or improving existing project documentation, for onboarding, technical support, and industry integration.

When project contributors vanish into the depths of a half maintained website, never to return, we offer assistance in developing community landing pages, or better optimizing existing pages, critiqued and re-envisioned by our UI/UX designers for the tasks required.

We also provide assistance with feedback systems to better understand the state of the community within each project. It might be assistance with GitHub, community analytics through our analytics platform Mystic, or deliberate feedback from our design team on points to improve on the project platforms themselves.

Finally, we can help our clients develop outreach and networking strategies, so that their community can reach more potential users.