Consortium events round-up for the summer of 2020
Every year the UK consortium plans events for institutional members. We plan these as needed depending on priorities for members at different times and specific aims the community agrees on to make progress with ORCID implementation in UK Higher Education. Hackdays and training events are two types of meeting we have used to help exchange knowledge and experience across the consortium, and to produce practical outcomes. Our annual event has become well established and is usually our largest event with most members represented.
At the start of 2020, we had launched a new type of event – regional meetings – to meet the need for shorter meetings requiring a smaller travel-and-time commitment from attendees. As March 2020 rolled on, planning for the second regional event was well underway, and the agenda for our annual event planned for May was shaping up nicely.
When it became clear in mid-March that these two events would not be able to go ahead face to face as originally planned, some rapid adjustment and quick-thinking was needed. We were not alone in needing to move our events online. Drawing on the experience of other Jisc colleagues, we reshaped our annual event into a series of online meetings, organised around 3 streams (or themes). The South East regional meeting, which was originally going to be hosted by University College London, also took place virtually. We also had one other event planned for March – a webinar with Symplectic Elements presenting the new features for integration with the ORCID API.
South East regional meeting
Regional meetings give access to the community of practice around ORCID in UK Higher Education whilst making fewer demands on time. They help people make connections with others dealing with similar issues in their local area, share resources, information and experiences.
At the South East meeting, which was held virtually, some of the themes discussed included: experience of advocacy across different institutions, working with practice based research, and evaluating how best we can draw on cross-service collaboration across an institution.
The notes from the day are available in a collaborative document. Two presentations by Kirsty Wallis and Jenny Evans are also available.
Kirsty Wallis, UCL: ORCID lived experience across two institutions.
Slides on Zenodo Recording from the Jisc YouTube playlist
Jenny Evans, University of Westminster: Practice-based (arts and architecture) research
Slides on Zenodo Recording from the Jisc YouTube playlist
Consortium annual event
The consortium annual event was organised into three streams, spread out over a few days as it was quickly recognised that a whole-day online event is too demanding. Our parallel sessions were run at different times, with the advantage that attendees did not have to choose between them this year. We know that our participants value peer interaction very highly – this comes across very strongly in feedback each year. To try and replicate the interstitial spaces – those chats over coffee or lunch – we also included some sessions with a social focus. Read more about our Elevenses.
All the materials from the different streams and sessions are available from the Jisc events page. In summary, these were:
Stream 1 Updates and reflecting on 5 years of the consortium, and a guest speaker held on 6th May 2020
Stream 2 Experiences from institutional members and researchers held on 12 May 2020
Stream 3 A series of sessions held between May and August on different themes including vocabularies for work types, Birds of a Feather meetings on different systems, and social events.
Symplectic webinar 20 March 2020
A webinar showing the new ORCID integration features available in Symplectic, with a demo by Sam Gibbons Frendo.
Recording of the webinar and notes made during the meeting.
Open Repositories 2020
Finally, as a team we also participate in events organised by others to touch base with international activity. This year we had submissions accepted to Open Repositories. Our contributions focus on two aspects – work on PIDs which you can read about in this poster and the CoRDA project that was presented as part of the developer track. The slides are also available.
Updated on 7th September 2020 with links to Open Repositories 2020