Research Community Managers: Overview

Community Management as a profession was developed to facilitate the social, informal and formal learning processes, which take place in Communities of Practice - “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” Lave & Wenger (1991). Community Managers have been employed in open source projects in technical industries since the early 1990’s Michlmayr (2009) , and more recently in research organisations (Universities and research institutes), where they are often known as Research Community Managers.

What do Research Community Managers do?¶

Research Community Managers work to engage, enthuse and organise groups of scientists, researchers and/or patients and the public around shared research topics and objectives. They are often involved in culture change to support collaboration between members of the community, through the development of community leadership and agency. They value the people doing the research and develop structures to support the generation of bottom-up activity. Their goals are to:

• Embed open, inclusive and reproducible research practices
• Ensure a shared understanding of goals, roadmap, processes
• Facilitate stakeholder engagement and collaboration
• Provide technical support and domain expertise
• Co-create, maintain and communicate project resources
• Amplify and champion community learnings and achievements

Each role is varied but the main activities are typically focused around advocacy for the community, stewardship, scaffolding for collaboration, and the flow of information across all levels of the research, both to and from leadership, and collaboration with the community.

Effective collaboration can also require management of relationships between colleagues, including coaching, formal and informal mediation, reflexive exercises, and dealing with formal Code of Conduct [def] processes. The aim of this work is to understand and gather learnings about how and where teams can work well together and diagnose issues that have contributed to challenges in collaboration. The Research Community Manager should then be well positioned to develop systems to support effective and inclusive collaboration, and mitigate harm to individuals or groups of the community.

Themes of Research Community Manager work can be:

• Catalysing connections with all stakeholders
• Fostering relationships within and between communities (integrating communities together)
• Linking the right people up together (based on expertise, interests and project goals)
• Identifying and developing engaged community members into community leaders
• Bridging between technical and non-technical members of the community by creating and delivering training
• Encouraging, modelling and mentoring community members in high standards of reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science
• Facilitating the creation of sub-networks within the community around shared experiences, for example, an early career researcher network

The day-to-day tasks of a Research Community Manager could include:

• Developing a strategy for community activities in alignment with the goals of the wider research project
• Organising and hosting community calls
• Onboarding new members
• Attending community and project leadership meetings
• Writing community reports or newsletters
• Maintaining and updating the community repositories and online spaces
• Collaboratively writing academic papers
• Maintaining and catalysing communication on community forums
• Planning for upcoming community initiatives
• Running training courses and workshops
• Reading and sharing publications relevant to the community
• Managing membership lists
• Mentoring community contributors
• Meeting with and listening to community members to understand their needs and challenges
• Maintaining stakeholder and project databases
• Advocating for the community and project at external national and international meetings by giving presentations and running workshops
• And a lot more!

What qualifications or skills do you need to be a Research Community Manager?¶

The vast majority of Research Community Managers will have a scientific background that may include advanced degrees (at a Master’s or Doctoral level). Many Research Community Managers also have a background related to the specific field or discipline they manage a community in, but not all of them do - many parts of the research process, tools and practices for collaboration are transferable across domains. If the community is associated with software or programming, it is common for Research Community Managers to have some coding skills. The focus on inclusive collaboration requires that Research Community Managers have significant depth of understanding in issues relating to Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging - see [def] .

There is no professionally recognised qualification or training course to become a Research Community Manager, but organisations do offer training and resources to help support the professional development of people in these roles. The values and approaches Research Community Managers bring to their roles are often the most important qualifications for success as a Research Community Manager.

Challenges for Research Community Managers¶

• Need to mediate between community members
• May not be seen as part of the community themselves and need to build trust and credibility within it
• Need to have a broad range of skills and expertise (technical, interpersonal, project management)
• Supporting and encouraging engagement in the community
• Building infrastructure from scratch in newly created roles
• Connecting with new audiences who are not aware of the community
• Bridging and translating between different groups in the same field or institution
• Managing tasks where there are little formal processes in place
• Managing priorities between different stakeholder groups
• Not always visible when things go well!
• Lack of formal career progression

Benefits to having Research Community Managers¶

• Able to offer meta-thinking about how the community is structured and run
• Shares best practices around research, communication, collaboration, diversity, equity and inclusion, and other areas of research
• Supports the upskilling of members via technical skill sharing and training
• Supports other members of the community to take on more active roles, including leadership, increasing sustainability, resilience and expansion of the community
• Stewarding initiatives to develop the community such as data standards, a Code of Conduct, or training workshops
• Offers a stable base for the community, to make sure information is documented consistently, meetings happen and relationships are strengthened
• Connecting groups working on similar projects to support increased collaboration
• Breaking down silos between departments, fields and research groups
• Greater understanding of the needs of the community

Organisations that support Research Community Managers¶

The Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (cscce.org works to “professionalize and institutionalize the role of the community engagement manager (CEM) within science.” They offer training, co-created resources, research, and an active community of practice for scientific community managers to connect and support each other.

The Alan Turing Institute has a team of Research Community Managers that work across different data science communities. More information about the team can be found on their webpage.

They have written a paper - Sharan, M., Karoune, E., Hellon, V., van Praag, C. G., Kayumbi, G., Bennett, A., Araujo Alvarez, A., Lee Steele, A., Batchelor, S., Lacey, A., Whitaker, K. (2024). Professionalising Community Management Roles in Interdisciplinary Research Projects. ArXiv e-prints, 2409.00108. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00108v1

And the paper includes various reusable resources such as a skills and competency framework and proposed career pathways.

Summary¶

Research Community Managers are an important part of scientific communities, supporting collaboration, best practices, and stewarding their communities as they develop. They do not have a formal career path or qualifications, but typically have a scientific or research background themselves.