The Australian BioCommons Community Engagement Strategy: Understanding community-scale challenges to inform solution delivery

ABSTRACT / INTRODUCTION 

Background

The Australian BioCommons develops digital capacity, training, and bioinformatics infrastructure to support Australia’s life scientists. So how can we identify the greatest needs of many thousands of geographically dispersed researchers, and also deliver useful infrastructure? Strong user engagement is paramount to understand community needs and direct the deployment and resourcing of appropriate infrastructure to ensure maximum impact.

Methods

We have developed a five-step process of engagement that maximises community interaction, from initiation to deployment.

Results

1/ Identify meaningful communities of manageable scope around focus areas with infrastructure challenges, such as genome assembly and annotation of non-model organisms, and microbiome analysis;

2/ Research the community topic area to understand broad needs and challenges to engage members; 

3/ Communicate with the broad community, inclusive of everyone from any expertise level or any institution, to identify issues, roadblocks, and solutions/suggestions through electronic surveys, shared discussion boards, and virtual meetings; 

4/ Document the challenges and, in discussion with infrastructure specialists, detail conceptual solutions with an endorsement from a subset of practitioners from the community, formalised in an Infrastructure Roadmap, which forms a blueprint for solutions that can be deployed to address the community challenges; and,

5/ Deploy and implement solutions with our infrastructure partners, with testing and feedback from the community. 

Conclusion

Through this engagement process, the Australian BioCommons has identified and then coordinated work to deploy essential infrastructure that was previously lacking to support critical communities (e.g. those undertaking genome annotation).  Successful outcomes are measured by positive responses from the community (e.g. turning up in large numbers, actively joining the discussion), and active use by early adopters, and uptake of deployed services that have been identified by various communities

The consultation method is now being applied to engage a diverse range of communities.