Research Infrastructure Roles Hackathon

It is rare that successful collaborations occur without a person, or group of people, taking on the work of structuring participants' interactions, facilitating work, and supporting the impact of the project. These people may be either volunteers or paid, depending on a project’s funding, size, length, and number of organisations involved.

They’re called research infrastructure roles because the work they perform is primarily to support the work of researchers, although research can also be a significant proportion of these roles as well. The specifics of these roles will vary but can include handling administrative work, managing data storage, stakeholder engagement, community management, communications, software engineering, events coordination, and a lot more.

People performing these types of roles come from varied backgrounds, but will often have some research experience, although not necessarily in the field they are now working in. At the Alan Turing Institute, our Tools, Practices, and Systems (TPS) programme is developing several of these roles including: Community Managers and Research Application Managers, alongside the more established Research Software Engineers and Data Stewards. 

Because these roles may exist in other forms and under other names, it can be challenging to identify best practices, build collaborative relationships, and capture the impact of these roles across different institutions and fields. We can think of no better place than the Big Team Science conference to start a larger conversation about research infrastructure roles and build connections and community for those working in these new positions. 

We propose a 90-min Research Infrastructure Roles Hackathon, similar to The Turing Way Book Dash which our team organises biannually, as an interactive exercise for conference attendees to meet, discuss shared challenges, and co-create documents capturing their personal experiences and best practices as an open resource for others to reference as they develop out similar roles at their own organisations.

For this iteration of the hackathon, we propose focusing on the following topics:

• Introducing new research infrastructure roles at an organisation

• Identifying ways inter-role collaboration can diversify research outputs 

• Capturing opportunities for culture change towards Team Science practices

Our session will start with a 15-min general introduction to the hackathon and to some Research Infrastructure Roles, led by our team members who are working in those roles. Then for the next 60 minutes, participants will split into breakout rooms focused on their topic of interest, facilitated by our team. This session will focus on discussion and co-writing, and our team will prepare templates ahead of time to support the integration of the created text into new chapters in The Turing Way, so that participants will see their work published in the open access digital book soon after the hackathon. For the final 15-min, we will reconvene as a group to share what has been created in the process and discuss our shared findings through the hackathon.