3rd project team meeting minutes

Our third RePosit project team meeting was held on Thursday 13th and Friday 14th January, running on the afternoon and following morning, at the University of Leeds. This is a key point in the project, just before the planned start of advocacy work, so this was our chance to test-run and tweak some of the advocacy materials, finalise the designs and decide on the survey. Of course, nothing happens quite as smoothly as in an ideal world, so we found we still have work to do and changes to make. We covered quite a bit of ground over the two half days and there is plenty to read about in the full minutes.

In brief:

During the project progress review, we looked at where we are with each of the project outputs, and considered the current issues and risks (discussed in more depth in a separate post). The user community output was discussed, and agreement made that we don't want to reinvent the wheel by trying to create a completely new community, just provide a forum for discussion that doesn't current exist for a subset of the existing repository community and approach research managers as well. When looking at the designs of advocacy poster and postcard for researchers, it quickly became clear that not just the design but the content itself wasn't getting the message across – and so we brainstormed new, punchy straplines and came up with our final choices: 'Spotlight on Your Research' and 'Don't Hide Your Assets'. This means a delay to finalising the materials, but they are getting there.

For the survey, we found that despite earlier fears to the contrary, all partner institutions are signed up with Bristol Online Surveys, so we can use that method. We fleshed out more details of the core questions and agreed there would be an institution-specific set as well. The final survey details are to be agreed in a Skype call at the start of February. The two dry-run advocacy presentations in front of an invited audience were a massive learning experience. We learnt as much about what we need to do differently as anything else: keep it even shorter, tailor the message even more, start with the strongest arguments, have lots of real-life evidence, recap at the end with something memorable, cover the downsides, use the internationalisation argument... It also became clear that our pack of advocacy presentation slides in the project outputs needs to be alongside real examples of presentations from the project to show the slides in use, plus with a crib sheet containing things like useful answers to common problem questions. This will take almost the full project lifetime to come to fruition, as these exemplars and the crib sheet will be added to by all project partners through their own advocacy periods.

posted by: Lizzie Dipple