Highlighting 'open science champions' with FOK campaigns

[CooperSmout]

@malvikasharan of the Turing Way project had a suggestion for how we can increase awareness and build support for our campaigns, while fostering diversity in academia. Her idea was to find an 'open science champion' for each FOK campaign -- someone who we can highlight as an exemplar and leverage their expertise in the practice in question. This champion could help increase awareness of our campaign, and in return our campaign can offer them a platform and visibility for their open science efforts (particularly good if we can highlight researchers from diverse backgrounds). We could even host an online workshop, in which our champion teaches the participants how to do the practice, shows some good examples, and answers questions from the crowd. If we were to coincide the campaign launch with the workshop, this could be an effective way to bring awareness to the campaign and increase the number of pledges. For example, after our champion has given her presentation, we could introduce the campaign, invite feedback/finalise the design, and invite workshop attendees to take the pledge. Hopefully many of the workshop participants would be willing to sign and follow up by promoting the campaign, but at the very least it would be good advertising for the campaign and an opportunity to collect critical feedback (plus highlight our champion's awesome work).

What do people think of this idea? Would you join us at a workshop? Would you help us organise it? This would be a lot of work, so it only makes sense to do if there are a few of us willing to put in some time, but we could also start small (with a single 1.5hr workshop for one of our campaigns) and build up from there.

Some considerations

• different fields have different needs, and so we will probably need to have a different champion for each research field (within each campaign), e.g. one champion from neuroscience, another from biology, etc., who can teach about best practices within their field
• I'm not sure how this impacts the workshop, as in whether we need a separate workshop for each field or whether we could host a general workshop on the practice in question and then split off into different breakout rooms, depending on our fields, where a different champion gives us advice tailored to our particular field. I guess this could be determined on a campaign-by-campaign basis, depending what makes sense

[CooperSmout]

Ps. Please feel free to suggest other names than 'champion' here, as I'm not sure that 'champion' is the best title

[CooperSmout]

Just discovered there's a 'data champion' programme at Cambridge, so perhaps the title is a good one. Note for future: leverage this community to find champions for the open data campaign