CW21 Goals and Objectives

What we hope to achieve by running the event (goals) and a set of measurable steps towards achieving our goals (objectives).

Themes

Goals
  • Increase confidence and understanding of key topics for the research software community that also fit into the wider aims and goals of the Institute.
Objectives
  • Participants will discuss topics related to the themes:
    • FAIR Research Software
    • Diversity and Inclusion
    • Software Sustainability
      • Capacity building of skilled researchers
      • Recognition of software contributions
      • The need for software oriented career paths
      • The importance of reproducible research
      • Open development
  • FAIR Research Software fits into the Institute’s wider goals and activities around recognition of software as a research output and reproducible research.
  • Connect Librarians, Research Data Managers and FAIR Data working groups with the FAIR Research Software community and working groups.
  • Participants will learn about the diversity and inclusion research conducted by the Institute and provide feedback.
  • Unaddressed discussion topics related to the themes will be brought into the SSI Fellow’s Community Calls.

Social

Goals
  • Improve social aspects of a virtual unconference.
  • Increase opportunities for participants to network, meet new people and start new collaborations.
  • Increase opportunities for community members who are unable to attend to engage with the discussions.
Objectives
  • Call for participant-led social programme.
  • Dedicated networking session.
  • Participants to have met at least 7 new people.
  • Participants intending at least 1 new collaboration on average.
  • At least 25% who have not attended CW before and are not Fellows or in the Fellowship application process.

Diversity

Goals
  • Improve accessibility from CW20.
  • Increase diversity and representation from CW20 (race, gender, career stage, role, location, etc.).
  • Increase opportunities for community members who are unable to attend to engage with the discussions.
Objectives
  • Include closed captioning / transcription services.
  • Provide advice to participants on how to get the most out of the virtual unconference (setup, equipment, expectations).
  • Include Diversity and Inclusion as one of the themes for CW21.
  • Ensure at least 50% of the keynote speakers are women.
  • Increase BAME representation above CW20.
  • Measure and compare demographics of CW21 with CW20.
  • Develop social media strategy to promote discussion topics which arise during the unconference to include and engage community members who are unable to attend (e.g. due to location or other commitments).

Sponsorship

Goals
  • Maintain relevance of sponsors to themes and audience.
Objectives
  • Reformulate sponsorship packages to account for online format.
  • Target new sponsors compared to previous years (esp. Silver and Gold).
  • Invite sponsors from previous years to engage.

Technical

Goals
  • Improve the documentation and infrastructure for running a virtual unconference.
  • Facilitate a smoother running of the Hack Day compared to CW20.
  • Increase reusability and openness of unconference outputs.
  • Increase participant interaction in mini-workshops and demo sessions.
Objectives
  • Document process and lessons learned as we go along.
  • Successful use of uCONFLY infrastructure.
  • Restructure Hack Day
  • Allow free form team formation in the Hack Day more akin to a face to face gathering.
  • Design adjustable schedule depending on number of participants/teams.
  • Offer facility for teams to break into sub-groups to work on specific tasks.
  • Write clear guidance for what information teams should include in their project demos to make judging more efficient.
  • Use platforms appropriate for the sessions (investigate use of platforms for online mingling).
  • Participants take skills, techniques, tools and resources back to their communities.