ResearchOps finds a home on the web
tl:dr: This little post is a joyous celebration of all the people, thoughts and work required to make the new ResearchOps website.
How we got here:
In March of 2018, Kate Towsey started the ResearchOps Community by posting a little unassuming tweet.
The community grew and grew and grew.
In about June of 2018, midway through our first epic global adventure of defining #WhatIsResearchOps, we started to realise that we’d need a place to put all the things we were creating, and that the world seemed hungry for.
A small group started as early as March 2018 to pull together some ideas. They were Andrew Maier, Damjan Obal, Carl Jeffrey and Kate Towsey.
On the original mood board, they noted ResearchOps was about:
- Leadership
- Alignment
- Team sport
- Accessible
- Friendly
- Dynamic
- Extensible
- Smart
- Thoughtful
- Intersectional
- Sketchy/ill-defined (as of yet!)
It’s pretty cool that these words are still more or less who we are.
Meanwhile, Kate, Emma Boulton, Megan Blocker, Jessica Lewes and Brigette Metzler got to work on what exactly ResearchOps was (yes, yes, we quickly realised we’d need to do ‘some’ workshops!). It has to be said, we quickly found there are no websites for ResearchOps. There are no resources, no central spots for anything. A website was sorely needed. Not just for the community, but for the profession.
A Team was formed – Team ReOps. They were:
The ReOps Branding
Nishita Gill and her team from Treemouse set to work putting in place a vision of the brand of Re+Ops.
The clear blue they chose represented the primary nature of Ops. That Ops was the foundation of the capacity for research to scale. The symmetry and balance of the Re+Ops reflects the balance in the community of research and operations. The white space reflects the space we Ops people give to researchers to get on with their craft of research. It also reflects the enormous power of Ops to create capacity and demand for research. Implementing a whole Ops function means knowing that you are unleashing something you’re unlikely to have experienced before – buckle up!
What do people need from a ReOps website?
After 18 months, the two most common questions are:
- How to join the community
- What exactly is ResearchOps?
The Home page aims to meet those two needs upfront. We hope that is obvious and simple to find.
The About page aims to expand on the home page and give more detail.
Of course, the community is primarily why we are here, and so we have a whole page dedicated to the community and what we’re doing, including links to all our spaces. We can be found on Twitter, Medium (obviously) and LinkedIn as well as on Slack. We haven’t done many this year, but we do the occasional public town hall as well, and those are posted to our Vimeo.
The final page, the Resources page, meets our third most common question, ‘Does anyone have any resources or lists associated with my Ops role (be that recruitment, knowledge management etc)?’.
Earlier in 2019, we arrived at the 8 pillars that define the connection between research and Ops and help us provide a framework for the model of ResearchOps we created after the #WhatIsResearchOps workshops. This is, in effect, a map for the community, guiding us in understanding where to focus our energies and our crazy, global projects. Each of the projects produces resources for Ops people, and it is on the resources page, that we will add links and develop that knowledge base. So if you’re looking for resources to do your ResearchOps job, keep checking back in, as this section will grow and grow as the community works to better understand each aspect of ResearchOps.
Phew, we got there! Or at least, the start of ‘there’.
It hasn’t been easy. Writing out what ResearchOps is, was incredibly clarifying, but clarity doesn’t come easily. It required long conversations, and even a few tears as we struck the balance between ResearchOps the community (which contains a lot about the craft of research), operationalising research, and full-blown, in all it’s awesome power, profession that is ReOps.
This tension is probably apparent to anyone who reads the content on the website. In the end, we decided to let the tension stand, because if we’ve learned anything these past 18 months, it is that being a ResearchOps professional is about walking a tightrope, it is holding lines for researchers. To be successful at ResearchOps, and indeed, at holding space for the ResearchOps Community, what’s needed is abandoning oneself to the idea that ResearchOps is a symptom of a complex system evolving at scale. Much better to just find clarity in the complexity than try to force it to be predictable and contained.
The ReOps website is a collection of love for the community and the profession, and exists only due to the care and attention of those mentioned above, but, so that you understand the full depth of time and commitment, the following people must be recognised:
Kate Towsey of course, for setting those few beers in the corner on the internet and getting us started.
Nishita Gill for her skill in seeing the community as we are, and converting that to our brand image, for the first prototype of the website and all the background effort.
Chris Adams for getting the tech aligned, for being ever cool and calm.
Andrew Maier for taking the prototype and doing all the work to get it into its home on GitHub, for endless patience and for responding with openness and positivity, even when things got tough. For hours and hours of edits between us.
Brigette Metzler for holding the tension between Re + Ops and keeping it steady. For lots and lots of words.
Emma Boulton and Holly Cole for seeking clarity and holding both Research and Ops in each hand.
Tomomi Sasaki, Dave Hora, Brad Orego, Hugo Froes, Judith Mühlenhoff and Rebecca Wood-Spagnoli for working on the words and making sure we got the balance right.
We did it. Like all good things, it is a living thing and will change a lot. But we do now have a home on the web, and now everyone can find how to join, and they can find who we are and have all the links to all the things, including resources for doing their jobs, all in the one spot. That’s gotta be worth celebrating!
