The Funder Data Platform: building tools for better data sharing in science funding
At Wellcome’s Data team we’ve worked to find new ways of facilitating data sharing between funders of scientific research. We believe better data sharing will help unlock new insight into the research landscape — particularly around diversity and research culture.
We’ve developed the Funder Data Platform to be a secure space for data sharing and analysis with partners. Organisations can upload and grant access to data for the purpose of collaborative projects. Researchers can then use analysis tools like Jupyter notebooks in a secure, closed environment. Once a project is completed, aggregate insights can be approved to leave the platform.
Creating a product for data sharing carries inherent risk. Due to this sensitivity, early work on the product was mostly driven by business and legal needs. Wellcome initially funded a small team of two developers to explore what was technically feasible. After the technical prototype we brought in a full product team with design, user research and delivery management expertise to develop the platform further.
The Funder Data Platform is now live, though with closed access, with its first project, Criteria which involves global funders including Welcome, Novo Nordisk, the Michael Smith Foundation and India Alliance. The goal of Criteria is to look at factors that explain differences in how women are funded compared to men, using data about which researchers have and have not funded.
The Funder Data Platform and Criteria project have been developed to support the Research on Research Institute and their mission to improve how we fund, practice, evaluate and communicate research.
Taking the Funder Data Platform from technical prototype to a product that meets user needs and satisfies legal terms and conditions required us to evolve our ways of working. Here are some of our lessons learned from developing the platform.
Focusing on user needs and being transparent with business stakeholders
As we’ve built the platform we’ve had to balance user, business and legal needs. We realised after the technical prototype was created that we had to separate these needs from each other to create focus in the team and with stakeholders.
Each quarter we set explicit OKRs (objectives and key results) related to specific flows that help users achieve a goal in the product, such as setting up a project, having the right tools for data analysis in the workspace or exporting results from the platform.
We brought project and legal stakeholders in as collaborators at design phases to help us understand and map any constraints. Working in this way helped us get the right feedback from experts early, which then gave us the ability and space to design flows that worked for users. Though the platform was not in production with active users, we ran regular monthly usability sessions as designed and developed each section of the platform. This helped us to stay focused and prioritised on user needs.
Breaking down the service into smaller flows and reducing complexity
With a product that has many legal complexities and where the team is working from discovery, we needed to be very clear about what we were working on when, and why.
Co-designing flows and mapping with users and stakeholders meant that we got better feedback than if we had just a conversation, or only decided to share once we’d finished designing and building the product feature.
We worked on setting objectives together as a team so we understood what we wanted to achieve before we got started on the work. We also shortened our operating rhythm so there were more opportunities for us to parts of the team like design and engineering to collaborate, feedback and adjust plans if needed.
Being clear about user roles and understanding the legal intricacies of building a data sharing product
With the Funder Data Platform we’ve tried to make processes related to data sharing that are inherently complex, simpler for users. We’ve achieved this partly by having clear user roles and boundaries around which users can upload and grant access to data, and which others can join projects and work on data in our closed environment.
We also spent time with our legal colleagues mapping out all of the legal checkpoints in the product to understand where we needed to add friction in the platform.
Overall we tried to create a sustainable working culture in the team by being clear that one platform won’t solve all the challenges with data sharing. We hope that the Funder Data Platform will go some way to breaking down barriers to collaboration between funders of research so we can use data to improve research culture and the research landscape.
