abc for sustainable crowdsourced public engagement

http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/index.html

It was my pleasure to present again this week the ‘abc for sustainability’ framework we developed at Oxford back in the day.

The University of Edinburgh Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Network hold regular event throughout the year, and this week it was my turn. I was delighted also, to have with me again, my colleague Kate Lindsay.

A recording of the event will be available soon, which is lucky, because there weren’t very many people in the room. Kate presented the story of the Great War Archive, an OER digitisation and community crowdsourcing initiative begun in 2008 which continues to grow and thrive. I merely set the scene for her by covering the basic underpinnings of the Oxford Community Collection model.

Lorna tweeted and storified.

The RunCoCo project (2010-2011) supported the projects funded by JISC as part of their Developing Community Content call. “The suite of projects funded under the JISC’s Community Content call are aimed firstly at creating and enhance digital content collections by developing the engagement between content owners in the universities and specific, or general, groups of the external public. Secondly, they are intended to develop more strategic co-ordination within the universities, focusing on the relationship between digital collection curators and business and community engagement teams.”

RunCoCo was set up to offer advice, training and open source software to those interested in running a community collection online. The outcomes and lessons learned can be synthesised into a simple ABC of advice for projects and groups who aim to ‘crowdsource’ with sustainable success:

Aim for two-way engagement;
Be part of your community;
Challenge your assumptions.

The outputs of the project are available on the RunCoCo website for free. These include guides, workflows, reports, training materials and open source software.

The content of my presentation was based on the JISC report ‘Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources: The JISC eContent Programme 2009-11’. Our chapter is: Edwards and Highton (2011) ‘RunCoCo: How to Run a Community Collection Online‘.

It is a wee bit disconcerting to find that since the JISC pages are all disrupted, you have to look in the web archive to find it. http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140615013612/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/general/2011/JISCeContentClusteringAndSustainingDigitalResources.pdf

It’s a good read. Jisc at its best.