The Australian BioCommons Community Engagement Strategy: Engaging Researchers at a National Scale to Understand Challenges and Deliver Solutions

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;
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; 
5/ Deploy and implement solutions 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 of deployment at this early stage 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. 
The method is now being applied to engage a diverse range of communities.