A new tool for Global Researchers
From your friends in the ResearchOps Community
If you’ve been following along here in the ResearchOps Medium publication, on Twitter, or in our LinkedIn group, you’ll have noticed that the ResearchOps Community is not shy about trying things that seem impossible, improbable, and (generally speaking) a LOT of effort.
We’ve done two global projects, WhatIsResearchOps (#WhatIsResearchOps and #WIRO) and the Research Skills Framework (#RSF). We are now partway through our third global effort, this time on Research Repositories. We’ve set out to discover why we need them, what we need to put one together, and how we maintain them to deliver lasting value for people doing, using, or supporting user research.
The project
We won’t go too far into it (you can read an early outline of the project here), but it is a big project. Back in July 2019, about 65 people got together to discuss what they wanted to know about research repositories (also called libraries) for user, UX, and design research as well as what we thought we as a community could do. It was a long list. We purposefully left everything on the list, knowing we could rationalize and narrow scopes as we went along and learned more while doing.
The three streams
A list that big, however, requires a way to break it down into manageable chunks. We broke the work up roughly into three streams — Research, Data, and Governance.
The deliverables for governance
The governance stream aimed to produce:
- A compendium of Human Research Laws and Policies around the world
- GDPR best practices
- Consent form prototypes
- Methods to share & reuse data
- Links on ethics, privacy, governance, and consent
- A decision tree on how to utilize the repo-gov database to help guide researchers
What we’ve done so far
- Personally Identifiable Information (shortened in practice to “PII”) Laws around the world
- GDPR best practices — We found a lot of work already done on this. Therefore, we’ve put together a list of guides that we’ll release with the other links set out below.
- Consent form prototypes — We’ve worked so very hard on this. It’s been a HUGE team effort and we’ve just about finished this piece of work. Its likely to be the next thing we share so keep an eye out!
- Methods to share & reuse data
- Links on ethics, privacy, governance, and consent
- A decision tree on how to utilize the repo-gov database to guide researchers
The special sauce of doing ops well — making stuff accessible, updatable, searchable, filterable…
Early on, we found the US government Department of Health and Human Services produces a wonderful International Compilation of Human Research Standards. We loved it so much! But there were some problems. The compilation is in PDF format. It is 180 or so pages long. It’s not filterable, not easily searchable, and definitely not accessible/a11y compliant. We figure it must be hard to maintain too.
So, we saw a good thing and decided to make it better.
Announcing the PII database!
We took all that awesomeness, checked it, sorted it, and made an airtable database out of it. Special call out to Dorthe-Maj Jacobsen and Christina Tan for all the work they put in for this! We called it the PII database because ultimately, the laws are about personally identifiable data. They also cover guides on standards for human research ethics, but a PII database it is.
If you’ve ever wondered why you have to do what you do when you’re planning, doing, or managing research and research data, look no further.
If you’ve ever started a research project that covered more than one country, look no further.
If you need that 180-page US government Department of Health and Human Services document, look no further! If you OWN or produce that document we would love for you to drop us a line, maybe you might like for someone like us to keep this database as up-to-date as possible? We are a community of helpers who would love to make this easier for everyone!
Whatever your needs, we’re here for you because Ops for Research + Ops people is what we’re here as a community to do — to further the profession of ResearchOps and to help the people helping researchers do their best work.
Key links from this short article:
ResearchOps Airtable landing page in the Airtable Universe: https://airtable.com/universe/creator/usrw2GTsPLA5UaT1E/team-reops
Early Project Plan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1odUYDw7fPpngovrcAGTAG79v0OkfN9g-Hq9M3prXuT4/edit?usp=sharing
