Speaker
Description
Communities of practice (CoP) bring value to organisations as they are a bottom up approach that collectively accelerates the development of community agreed standards. For the ARDC these CoPs are fundamental to developing shared infrastructures and enabling interoperability.
This poster illustrates the importance of managing ARDC-facilitated CoPs effectively and outlines a procedure that ensures consistency and alignment with the ARDC’s strategy.
The procedure aims to provide a consistent and effective approach across the ARDC when initiating, engaging with, and discontinuing communities. It enables the ARDC to monitor the impact of involvement across a range of communities, ensures balanced decisions on agreed communities to support and provides the basis for consistent high quality community engagement.
For the ARDC to understand the changes needed in the management of its facilitated CoPs, it is necessary to evaluate them periodically and their alignment with the ARDC’s focus areas (thematic Research Data Commons, Translational Research Data Challenges, Nectar Research Cloud, National Information Infrastructure and digital research skills).
Communities of practice also need to see themselves: as a group identity, in the outputs they strive for and deliver, and in the resulting network of relationships sustained by collective endeavour. An internal CoP of community facilitators supports processes for fostering emerging CoPs as well as the community review cycle, by enabling inter-group support and knowledge exchange. This vision of community management strategy can be implemented by other groups.
