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# System prepended metadata

title: Ambassador Schemes

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# Ambassador Schemes

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## Prerequisites


| Prerequisites | Importance | Skill Level | Notes | 
| -------- | -------- | -------- |-------- |
| {ref}`Collaboration <cl-newcommunity>`  | Helpful    | Beginner     | This chapter has lots of useful tips around managing a new community which can apply to ambassador schemes 
| {ref}`Collaboration <cl-coworking>` and {ref}`Collaboration <cl-chairing>`  | Helpful    | Beginner     | These chapters may be useful if you are planning to host events and/or co-working during ambassador schemes
| {ref}`Collaboration <cl-event-tools>`  | Helpful    | Beginner     | This chapter gives a useful overview of collaboration tools which can be deployed in an ambassador scheme


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illustration??

## Summary

Ambassador schemes are growing in prevalence in data science settings. In academic and academic adjacent organisations, they are usually programmes that allow external researchers to develop skills or projects and become part of that organisation’s community. Often these schemes focus on supporting early career researchers. 

To be successful these schemes require careful planning and considerations to ensure participants of the scheme engage, feel supported and also that the scheme is mutually beneficial. Ambassadors may receive training to effectively carry out their responsibilities, and they often play a crucial role in building positive relationships and conveying the values and strengths of the community they have joined.

We recognise that the term 'ambassador scheme' does not have one definition and can span more widely, e.g such as a  'brand ambassador' in corporate settings, so we have tried to roughly define as above for the purposes of this chapter. We also are aware that these schemes can have a number of synonyms such as fellowship, scholar, champion, but for this chapter we will be using the term ambassador. 


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## Motivation and Background

Many organisations, such as the [Software Sustainability Institute](https://www.software.ac.uk/programmes/fellowship-programme), [ELIXIR](https://elixiruknode.org/activities/fellowship/) and [Women in Data Science Worldwide](https://www.widsworldwide.org/join-us/ambassador-program/) have developed and launched schemes of this nature. 


The [Turing-Roche Partnership](https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/alan-turing-institute-roche-strategic-partnership) launched its [Community Scholar Scheme](https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/alan-turing-institute-roche-strategic-partnership/community-scholars) in September 2023 and the team wanted to share their experiences and learnings from developing and running this scheme in the Turing Way as well as hearing from others. We hope the chapter will be a useful starting point for anyone looking to establish one of these types of schemes. 

Although there are often similar aspects to these schemes, they can vary widely in practice and we would encourage anyone who runs or has been part of one of these schemes to contribute a case study to this chapter on their experiences. 


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## Turing-Roche Community Scholar Scheme Personal Story

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### Introduction
My name is Vicky Hellon and I am the Research Community Manager for the [Turing-Roche Strategic Partnership](https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/alan-turing-institute-roche-strategic-partnership). This 5-year partnership is developing new data science methods to investigate large, complex, clinical and healthcare datasets to better understand how and why patients respond differently to treatment, and how treatment can be improved.

This personal story covers our experiences of establishing an Ambassador Scheme, which we named the Turing-Roche Community Scholar Scheme. We hope it will provide some useful guidance for anyone interested in these schemes.

### Motivation and Background

Our initial ideas around the scheme were born out of discussions around having more conference representation from the partnership and whether we could run a scheme that funded conference travel for students to do this.

From this we realised we had the capacity to actually run a scheme where early career researchers could travel to a conference but also engage further with the partnership and run their own community projects. It was also an ideal time to set it up (around two years into the five year partnership), as it meant we had research up and running that participants could integrate into community projects- I think we were not established enough to run the scheme any earlier. The main benefit of the scheme would be increasing the reach and engagement of the partnership by working with students in relevant research areas, connecting with their networks and overall bolstering our community. 

At that time, if you wanted to engage with the partnership as an external researcher the main ways you could do this were through our open research funding calls or through some community activities, such as virtual seminars, we had running. Therefore we also felt this scheme would support me as the Community Manager to increase the ways for the growing external community to participate through the community projects. 

Lastly, the scheme would be a great opportunity for us as an academic-industry collaboration to play a role in supporting the career development of early career researchers and giving them experience of two different types of organisations which we felt passionate about. This also was delivering more tangible impact and legacy for the partnership beyond the research collaboration itself. 


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### Scheme Set-up

The Turing Institute had a student scheme in place (the Enrichment Scheme) but this worked quite differently to what we wanted to do for the scholar scheme, so the set up was as a brand new programme, which with documentation and processes, was a huge undertaking. As with any new project or activity it was useful to think about what we wanted to achieve with the scheme and work backwards from there to brainstorm how it should work in practice. 

We put together an initial scoping document, ensuring objectives of the scheme were in place and the roles and responsibilities supporting its implementation were well defined. We took this to the partnership leadership team to get some early feedback. The decision was taken to ensure that the projects would be community based, rather than research based due to intellectual property agreements in place between Turing and Roche.
We also shared the document with the finance, legal and project management teams at the Turing to understand what details we'd need to provide and finalise for approvals. Getting the scheme signed off with each department unsurprisingly turned out to be what took the longest in the set-up phase. 

With finance, we had initially wanted to open the scheme to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, however we felt strongly about paying a stipend to the scholars and this proved tricky for people on a non-student contract so the decision was taken to open to PhD students only. We also settled on only PhD students based in the UK for the same logistical reasons.

With legal, we put in place a framework and discussed issues around data protection, time commitment for students and sign off from their supervisor and using Turing-Roche branding for things that would be made externally available from the community projects.

For project management, we have a full time project manager working on the partnership so this was easier to plan with them- we discussed logistics around processing expenses for the scholars and a delivery action plan on how to launch the application process. 

Overall approval from all the departments required a lot of documentation on how things would work in practice and how we would navigate any potential issues. Whilst this felt like a lot of work up-front it was actually very helpful down the line to have pre-planned.

The format we finalised for the scheme was for a year long programme, welcoming 10 PhD students based at UK institutions. The scholars would  embed themselves within the partnership community, attend a relevant conference and undertake a selected, community-based project, with a £3000 stipend- £2000 paid directly (at the halfway and finish mark) and £1000 to use for conference and project expenses. 

We felt running the programme on an academic year timeline (September to September) would be helpful for students. We also took the decision not to open up the scheme to students in their first year of their PhD as we felt the time commitment of the scheme may be overwhelming for them. 

We put together various documentation when we opened applications for the scheme which you can find [here](https://www.turing.ac.uk/work-turing/open-call-turing-roche-community-scholar-scheme-2023-2024), which includes a call document, FAQs, a student agreement which sets out responsibilities and letters for the university department and students PhD supervisor to sign, so we could ensure they were on board with the student taking part. We also ran an information and Q&A session webinar which was helpful to see the level of interest from registrants and also gave us insights into what we needed to provide more info on from the Q&A session. We put a recording of this event on our YouTube channel for anyone who couldn't attend.

We opened applications for the scheme for 6 weeks over the 2023 June/July period. This was probably the minimum amount of time we would recommend having the applications open. For the process we tried to ensure the application process was fairly light-touch so as not to overburden the students. We provided some example projects that students could choose in their application but also gave them the option to apply with one they had designed, with no penalities either way.

We discussed having an interview process but in the end decided that we felt the application form would contain sufficient information for us to make a decision. The shortlisting panel was a diverse group from the partnership core team and we used the following criteria to assess the applications:

1. Relevance (in research/interests/education)- applicant has a good understanding of the partnership research and how their own research is relevant to this
2. Proposal (quality/scope)- applicant clearly identifying how they will put their project into action, how past experience will help with this
3. Motivations (clear or unclear)- applicant demonstrates clearly why they want to be a Community Scholar, how they will contribute


For unsuccessful applications we provided some short feedback and our project manager worked with the successful applicants to execute the necessary legal agreements ahead of the scheme launch which was in September 2024. At the time of writing we are about halfway through the scheme. 


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### Scheme in practice 
Before our first onboarding call we sent across a detailed onboarding document about the scheme which could also be referred to throughout the year. At the virtual group onboarding call we spent time giving information on how the scheme will work and also scheduled a last portion of the call for breakout rooms for socialising which was important for the scholars to get to know each other as a cohort. We led with a virtual first approach as our scholars were located across the UK.

In the weeks after this group onboarding call we then scheduled individual onboarding calls with each scholar to make sure they were set up on the correct systems (such as our Slack Workspace, Google Drive and our GitHub Repository) and helped them start to plan their projects and set out milestones on template documents we'd prepared.

We'd set out time commitment to the scheme at around 3-5 hours a month. Every two months we scheduled a virtual group cohort call where scholars filled in a document in advance with:

- A short project and conference update
- A rose- a line on something that has been going well
- A cactus- a line on something that has been tricky/not been going well
- Any asks you have for the group

At the call we would go through this document, encouraging the group to give advice and support for each other. The second half of the call would feature a guest speaker(s) from Turing and/or Roche on a topic we asked for scholars input on. Some of the topics we've had so far are 'Advice on how to become a better Data Scientist', 'Alternative Career Paths from the Turing' and 'Methods development: collaborations beyond industry'. 

In between these calls, our communication with the scholars was ad hoc as needed. Their main point of contact was me, partnership lead Sarah McGough who co-ran the scheme with me from the Roche side and our project manager Maria Anagnostopoulou for logistical queries such as expenses. The scholars could connect with us and each other through the Turing-Roche Slack Workspace, through a dedicated channel and individual messages. We also had calls with the scholars fairly regularly to support them fully on developing their projects. Different projects developed at different timescales so we found the support we were providing each scholar wasn't linear.

The projects the scholars developed varied widely. You can find the full list [here](https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/alan-turing-institute-roche-strategic-partnership/community-scholars), but some examples are a tech-talk event series, a Turing Way chapter on risk of bias, a one day conference bringing together data scientists and pathologists, a health data science podcast and a video animation series explaining partnership research. 

For their sponsored conference, we asked scholars to select one relevant to the partnership's research but also to their own studies. We encouraged them to present their research at the conference but this wasn't mandatory. Each scholar then produced a post conference output to feedback to the community about their experiences- an example blog from our scholar Syafiq Ramlee can be found [here](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/turing-roche-community-scholar-conference-wcrme/?trackingId=Y93IZUzd1wmtPPoNA6OTqA%3D%3D).

In terms of communications around the scheme, we announced it through a [webpage](https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/alan-turing-institute-roche-strategic-partnership/community-scholars) and also made the scholars milestone documents and conference tracking document available through our [GitHub Repository](https://github.com/turing-roche/turing-roche-documentation/tree/main/community-scholars). In our monthly partnership newsletter whe also featured a different scholar every month to raise their profile. 

At around the halfway point of the scheme, was AI UK, a national conference of data science and AI organised by the Turing. The partnership was exhibiting a booth here and we used this as an opportunity to invite the scholars to the conference to meet each other and the partnership team for the first time in-person. After the conference we also organised a social. We found this a really valuable experience for everyone getting to know each other better and making the cohort feel more cohesive. 

As mentioned earlier, the scheme has not finished at time of writing but we are planning a final in-person celebration event at the Turing to celebrate the scholar's achievements. They will also be writing a summary of their experiences which we plan to incorporate in a designed online yearbook. We also plan to gather formal feedback from the scholars on what we can tweak for next time.


### Learnings

Overall we're really proud of the scheme and very happy we established it. It was hard to predict what outcomes we would have from our first cohort but what the scholars have achieved through their creative and scientific backgrounds is phenomenal and wouldn't have been able to be achieved by our team alone. The success of the scheme has been in it being mutually beneficial- we have gained outputs that cover the breadth of the partnership and link to our research and the ecosystem of our research in a new engaging way, whilst the students have gained new skills and experiences outside of their PhD studies.

A key learning for us is the time commitment for the scheme on both sides. It was really valuable to have two people from the partnership team co-leading for support. Having 10 students was really a bit of a guess on our part as the right number but have found whilst this is a small group it was about right for supporting each student and encouraging a cohort feel. On the other side, its good to be clear about timings for the scheme for your participants and be wary they have other commitments. This is also why its useful to include project planning as part of the application process and the milestone plan we developed with students at the start.

Furthermore if you are having outputs from your participants, think about how and when these will be released. It may be impactful at the end of your scheme, or in our case a lot of the multimedia outputs we aimed to stagger throughout the year for more individual impact.

A key consideration should be around how to build a sense of community in your cohort which is always tricky. We found a shared Slack channel really helped for casual ad-hoc communication, particularly as our cohort was virtual first. Having a halfway point in-person meet up also helped a cohort feel, although this is balanced with the advantages of virtual such as accessibility and inclusivity.  

Our final bit of advice is to build flexibility into your scheme. Whilst planning is a must, we found once the scheme was up and running we did need to make some changes, examples being teaming up two scholars for a joint project to combine their strengths and the aforementioned halfway in-person meet up which we initially hadn't planned on but felt like a good opportunity. 








Additional resources that may also be of use in these planning stages are the {ref}`Turing Way Project Design Guide <pd-overview>`  and the {ref}`Ethical Consideratons when Choosing an Open Source Governance Model chapter <er-ethics-open-source-governance>`. 



https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/collaboration/academic-industry/academic-industry-personal-story update final paragraph- with link to new chapter and say we've launched the scheme 


## Citation

1) 

{cite}`datastudygrouproche`

@misc{datastudygrouproche,
  author = {Data Study Group Team},
  title = {Data Study Group Final Report: Roche},
  year = {2020},
  url = {https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/publications/data-study-group-final-report-roche}
  doi = http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3876989
}

2)

{cite}`academiaindustryguide`

@misc{academiaindustryguide,
  author = {Abuja, Peter M. and Carapina, Tamara and de Kort, Martin and 
 Raess, Michael and Tieken, Chris and Wagstaff, Nigel},
  title = {Academia - Industry Collaboration Best Practices Guide},
  year = {2019},
  url = {https://eatris.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/CORBEL_Academia_Industry_Collaboration_Best_Practices_Guide.pdf}
  doi = 10.5281/zenodo.2615365
}




