Getting to know ResearchOps and the ResearchOps Community
Community. It’s a thing we at ResearchOps take seriously.
When people join the ReOps Community via our join form on our website, we manually add them in as a cohort every two weeks. At first, one of our co-chairs (
) was sending an individual welcome message to our new members. But at a rate of 150 people being added every two weeks, that quickly became untenable. So we started only sending a message via the announcements channel. That was onboarding on the other end of the spectrum, and not enough.Two of our directors (
, ) worked with to improve the onboarding experience. We took what we learned from that work and moved to a greetbot that sends new members a message at stages — when they join and after they join.This post is to make the way we onboard new community members in the ResearchOps Community more public, and more permanent. One of the problems of running a community on a free Slack account is that messages eventually are archived. In a community as busy as ours, the messages archive much quicker than we are happy with. We’ll eventually move this over to our website, but for now, we’re adding it here for perpetuity of sorts.
We’ve received feedback that this greetbot message in particular is one people like to be able to dip in and out of over time, so here it is, so you never lose it again!
The message:
Hi there! It has been a whole week since you joined, we hope you’re enjoying being in the community and taking part in the many conversations :heart:
One thing that can be difficult about joining a community, is that it is a bit like turning up to a party halfway through.
This message is to give you a little bit of context about who we are, and how we came to be. We hope it’s useful, do let us know your thoughts :)
The first thing you might have noticed is that we have some definite ideas about what exactly ResearchOps is. Did you know it was _the first_ project we did together as a community?
Yup, 33 cities, 17 countries….we’re a bit passionate about ResearchOps, or ReOps as we call it.
Here’s a recording of the community call when we set out what we’d found: https://vimeo.com/304086842
Here’s a talk by Kate Towsey at UX Brighton telling you all about it: https://youtu.be/rz7sy81Yg5E
Since then, we’ve done _another_ global project, this time on Researcher’s Skills. @Dave Hora and @tomomi and the crew are still in analysis mode on that one, but you can keep up to date as findings are released via the ResearchOps Medium: https://medium.com/researchops-community
Our next project, Research Repositories, :book: is also in progress, and you’ll find updates there too.
As a community, we are here for the Ops, so we’ve been slowly developing toolboxes full of guides and templates and lists, and these are all found at the ResearchOps website: https://researchops.community
All this work we’ve done together has really helped us understand the relationship between User & Design Research and ResearchOps. @emmaboulton recently gave a great talk about the 8 pillars, and how that helps shape what we do as a community. You can catch up with a Medium post about that here: https://medium.com/researchops-community/the-eight-pillars-of-user-research-1bcd2820d75a
_Phew! We’ve been busy! Hopefully, that’s given you a little bit of context, so you can settle in and feel right at home. _:house:
You might have noticed that as a community, we’re still here, figuring it all out. If there’s a thing you want to talk about, or some aspect of ResearchOps that you’d like to see explored further, just let us know, we try to support everyone in the community to get in and take part in building the future of ReOps, and in helping researchers do their best work. Ask straight out on #Chatter or feel free to reach out to one of the board: me, (
), , , , , , , @Elizete , , , and .
