DMPonline & online community building during pandemic

Working as a part of the DMPonline team meant that we always had quite a lot of flexibility around our working arrangement and working from different sites. Shifting to working from home when the pandemic started was not that difficult for our team as we were always equipped to work remotely. Although as a team working from home was not a completely new challenge, the community building activities and catch ups became a new area that needed and still needs to be revisited during this time as we want to ensure that the current situation where most of us work from home and cannot meet in person still works for our community and offers plenty of space for discussions and communication.  

Many of you already know that community building and working with our existing customers is crucial for DMPonline. To be able to meet you on a regular basis face to face is very important to us due to various reasons. With the subscriptions being launched in 2018, it became even more important to run in person regular training sessions, user groups and socials where we could get to know each other and from these conversations built our tool for your needs. We are constantly trying to find out what the best ways are to gather feedback from you, best channels for you to communicate with us and having an active conversation with us about potential trainings, features and updates as well as ensuring that potential new requests can be well planned with our roadmap work, customisation and contract work as well as previous requests raised over the years. We want to make sure that our online sessions are engaging and responding to various needs you might have as well as offering a space where you as a research data management professional can also network and connect, and where we as a whole can  learn from one another. Apart of our communications streams with you including social media (Twitter; LinkedIn; Newsletter; YouTube channels: demo sessions, drop-ins, tutorials, how-to; blog posts and mailing lists). I am listing and describing here several sessions which currently help us to grow and maintain our community.  

DMPonline drop-in sessions  

Many of you will be familiar with our DMPonline drop-in sessions. We have been running DMPonline drop-in sessions now for more than a year, but it is now during pandemic we see more and more attendees joining. It might be due to increased communication around these, but also potentially due to ability to be more flexible, since with everyone working from home can just join us more freely in comparison when you were all at the office. We run these sessions normally once a month and they last currently around 30 minutes although we tend to go often over this time. We are also changing little bit the main focus of drop-ins. They started mainly as updates from our team and we still make sure we are having the space to update you on anything you might be interested in. We now offer these mainly as sessions with our invited speaker who do not talk just about their usage of DMPonline at their institution but also discussing RDM practices at their institutions more broadly. It is fantastic to see and learn how you bring various offices required to work on data management  together to deliver a coherent service. Also, it is interesting to learn about your communication with the researchers and having different activities that help you to raise awareness around using DMPonline (which often starts off these conversations with researchers) and data management planning in general. We are continuously revisiting how we can make these sessions more interactive, but for now we are grateful for your attendance and input in these. I am currently considering how to improve these and I thought that an update to these could be running more ‘mentimeters like’ questionnaires with you during these and potentially even extending this session from 30 minutes to 60 so you can potentially have more discussions with the attendees. Also, since we have been running these for some time, I am able to reflect on how I currently organise the playlist and I would like to revisit this with the new sessions while processing. I think that it might be beneficial in the future to categorise these with the name of the institutions and speaker and adding some keywords might be of help in the future. Let us know what do you think?  

DMPonline training  

Not to forget, when the pandemic started, we had to move our planned training in April online, running a morning and afternoon session. It was fantastic to have you there and be able to catch up at least online. The morning session was used more as a presentation of various new functionalities and offering you a demo of those whereas we used the afternoon session to support you trialling conditional questions with our team and have more one to one Q&A. This online training also offered us a lesson which informed us how to manage these better in the future. Although the feedback was fantastic, and we are very grateful so many of you attended we think that keeping these more focused and shortened in the future would be beneficial. It is very different to run training in person and online due to having to work around personal life and your and our children and pets (who are so happy to have us around). This might make running a whole day of training very challenging. Therefore, having more breaks and ensuring these will be shorter could help us to keep focused. We saw the slack channel well used for discussions with you, Zoom was helpful for breakout rooms and GoToMeeting for joining with you individually.  

DMPonline demo sessions 

Our demo sessions are a relatively new concept which started based on our most recent usability testing interviews. So far, we run two sessions: one on providing feedback and one on conditional questions. These function like very focused trainings where we always pick one functionality and we offer a demo of the feature. We also want to find out how you are currently using the feature or reasons for not to. Another good thing about these sessions is that we tend to also reflect on the proposed extensions on the feature and gather your further feedback which is valuable to us. For our demo sessions we also run a community agenda which you can use yo share with your colleagues. We want to though make these even more interactive and when appropriate, we would like to organise break-out rooms and offer you more space to discuss certain features and functionalities within the community. If you have any suggestions for future sessions or have thoughts on how we could improve these please do let us know here.  

DMPonline user groups 

Last but not least, user groups always offered a good space for us to discuss what features would you like to see in the future or being able to provide feedback on our proposed work. As we work with the roadmap team in California with whom we also share the codebase, this input is very interesting as new features added to our shared code base need to fit to all. And even more - local work that is implemented only in our service needs to be applicable to our clients with different maturity of research data management practices and who are all using DMPonline. These countries include currently the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia and Switzerland. Working with such a varied community means that sometimes quite advanced feature by well-established and research-intense institution might not benefit to the overall community and other features sometimes need to be prioritised. We have a lot of work coming up in 2021 and after our internal meeting and going through our contractual agreed work, we will be having our annual meeting with our Roadmap team early in 2021 where we will be prioritising work for the following year. We will organise a follow up meeting with all of you so you can provide us with a feedback and potentially tell us whether there are some features you might be benefiting from if implemented earlier (keep an eye on Twitter and our newsletter for the details).User groups can be quite challenging in terms of managing expectations. We want to ensure that we have regular catch up with you on planned features and also can gather requested new features from you. Nonetheless working in truly international environment we want to ensure that managing expectations we need to revisit the current format. We think that this could be achieved by having more guided conversations around what is on the plan with you and going through these with you might offer a better conversation.  

If you have any thoughts around community building activities of the above, or you would like to suggest anything else that you would benefit from please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. Last but not least I must add that we do miss the socials with you and ability to throw axes, having lovely meals and playing bowling. However, we hope that we will be able to revisit these in the near future. In the meantime, please feel free to contact us at the details below:  

• DMPonline helpdesk at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk  

• Social media: Twitter @mdDCC1, @DMPonline, and LinkedIn  

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