Research Community Manager Personal Story

Introduction - tell us about your background and how you became a RCM?¶

My name is Dr Emma Karoune and I’m currently a Principal Researcher focusing on Research Community Building at The Alan Turing Institute. I joined the Turing at the start of 2021 to be a Research Community Manager (RCM) for a Covid-19 research project. At this time, this role was new at the Turing and I could not actually be called a RCM so my job title was Research Associate.

Before I joined the Turing, I did quite a few different types of roles in and out of academia and I think this varied experience, and the skills I learnt along the way, make me ideal for the varied and broad work of a RCM. I started my academic career as an Archaeobotanists (an archaeologists that specialises in plant remains) with a PhD from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. In my PhD, I did a replication study of someone elses identification method, and quiet unsurprisingly!, I found it could not be replicated accurately. This sparked my interest in reproducibility and open research. After finishing my PhD, I went off to work in Education and trained as a high school science teacher and worked in various education roles for about 10 years. I then started to come back into academia and focus on open research. I’ve led community open research projects, such as the FAIR Phytoliths Project at Historic England, and I lead a community called Open Phytoliths that is striving to bring open research practices into this discipline (phytolith research) and also more widely in related disciplines such as Archaeology and Palaeoecology. I also work with other open research communities such as OLS, Software Sustainability Institute and ELIXIR.

Since working at the Turing, I have worked across different health data science projects and with interest groups and I also work closely with the Turing Skills Team on data science skills related research and community projects.

I very much see myself now as a generalist with lots of transferable skills that can be applied in any research domain and I really enjoy the challenge of working in multiple disciplines.

Embedding RCM at Turing¶

At Turing, I joined the Institute when there was only one other RCM - the wonderful Malvika Sharan working on the Turing Way. Malvika then led the establishment of the RCM team at Turing and we have worked together to grow the team and put in place processes and resources for setting up research communities for Turing projects. At it’s largest, the RCM team had 10 members, and we work as a cross-cutting team across the Turing on multiple projects and programmes. The team approach has enabled us to refine processes, establish ways of working and support each other. It has also allowed us to draw connections between our communities to reuse resources and share best practices across domains and sectors. Effectively making our community work more impactful.

We work closely with senior leaders to scope community management during the early stages of projects, ideally this is done at the funding application stage. This ensures that community management roles are properly resourced for the length of projects. We currently fund most RCM roles through research grants and therefore our roles are specifically tied to the programmes or projects where the funding sits. Although our positions are usually funded for 2 or more years, being tied to a project is not always ideal as we would like to have a bit more flexibility with our deployment of community management across the Turing Institute and we would therefore like to offer permanent positions for our team members for this reason and also to give greater job security helping us to retain skills and talent.

Challenges¶

As the RCM role is fairly new in research (they are frequently found though in open source and gaming communities), there are challenges in understanding the role and also getting buy-in and recognition for these positions.

This is one of a few emerging research infrastructure roles (also known as research technical professionals) and the work we do does overlap with other roles. We are one of multiple research infrastructure teams at Turing and so we have been doing some work to understand the scope of roles, similarities, differences and overlapping skills. We have created personas for all roles in data science teams at Turing - see Data Science Team Personas: case study from The Alan Turing Institute. But there is still a general knowledge gap that we have to fill when we first start working with new staff members at Turing and also external organisations. This lack of understanding of the role can sometimes lead to a lack of buy-in for RCM positions in projects.

Also on a personal level, it is risky for our own careers to take on a research infrastructure position at the moment as there is currently no defined career paths for this role, and others roles, and much of the work that we undertake is not recognised, or in fact measured, in current research metrics. This means at present it can be a disadvantage to us taking on these roles especially if we want to transition back to a traditional academic role. We may not be producing the kinds of traditional research outputs, such as research articles, which are currently a measure of academic success and are often needed to climb the academic career ladder.

Benefits¶

I’ve been lucky to work in a team of RCMs and this provides emotional support. This is really needed for any RCM as we deal with people day in and day out and all the delights but also all the problems that come with that work. It’s great to have colleagues that understand this and can be there to give advise and sometimes a shoulder to cry on.

RCM work is very varied and challenging. It’s great for people, like me, that love problem solving and not knowing what the next day will bring.

RCM work is also great experience and a wonderful stepping stone into senior research roles. Alot of the work we do involves skills that are needed for Team leads or Principal Investigators such as stakeholder management and engagement. We also often work at the strategic level of projects and very closely with senior team members. This experience is excellent for career progression.

Do you have any top tips for other people that might be interested in working as an RCM?¶

Not having been a research community manager before, and by that I mean not working in a job with the formal title, can hold people back from applying for their first RCM role. Don’t hold back! Often people work as community managers without being called a community manager. In research we naturally get involved in open research or domain specific communities and we take on some community building type tasks. This is how I started. These types of community spaces give you experience in things like running meetings, bringing people together to take part in events, writing for wider audiences and managing communication channels. These are all valuable skills for a RCM and you can put those on your CV and talk about them in an interview. If this work interests you, you should look out for roles and apply!