Speaker
Description
The Research Data Management (RDM) as infrastructure for academic research is persistently seen disconnected between the tools and services provided with the daily practices in research workflows. Researchers across disciplines continue to encounter substantial difficulties across the full data lifecycle encompassing data collection, documentation, preprocessing, versioning, long-term archiving, intra- and inter-team sharing, reuse, and metadata creation. Which also cause an additional burden on researchers, funding agency, and academic institutes to conduct the research process.
This participatory session invites researchers, academic experts, and faculty members to collectively examine, discuss, and design with structured participatory methodology designed to accommodate groups of up to thirty participants. The session employs three complementary evidence-based facilitation methods. It opens with 1-2-4-All a cascading reflection structure in which participants engage first in individual reflection, subsequently in dyadic exchange, then in groups, before contributing synthesised insights to a plenary discussion. This sequencing is designed to ensure equitable participation across career stages and disciplinary backgrounds prior to open deliberation. The second phase introduces Carousel Stations, in which small groups rotate through a set of thematically framed stations, each anchored by one of the session's guiding research questions. Participants contribute written responses and annotations that accumulate across rotations, enabling iterative, cross-group idea development without requiring dedicated per-group facilitation. The session concludes with Dotmocracy, a structured silent voting procedure through which participants collectively prioritise the most salient insights and directions generated across all stations, producing a transparent, visually legible record of community consensus.
The session will engage participants with the following guiding questions:
- In which ways does existing RDM infrastructure in academia fail to
adequately support authentic research workflows across disciplines - What are the most critical challenges associated with the long-term
archiving of research data and its effective sharing within and
across research teams? - At which points in the research process do issues such as data
loss, uncontrolled overwriting, absence of version control, or
inadequate metadata most frequently occur? - What might more collaborative, researcher-centred RDM solutions
look like, and how could they be better aligned with
discipline-specific research practices?
The session is designed not merely as a forum for articulating grievances, but as a generative, analytically structured engagement aimed at producing community-validated insights with direct relevance to RDM policy and infrastructure design. The tangible outputs of the session comprising thematic station sheets and a collectively produced, prioritised idea wall will constitute the primary empirical basis for a jointly authored paper or design direction document to be developed in the period following the event. Through the systematic integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives within an inclusive and methodologically rigorous participatory framework, this session seeks to identify actionable foundations for a more sustainable, usable, and researcher-centred culture of research data management.