SSI CW submission

Email: [e-mail]

1. First name

Bastian

2. Surname

Greshake Tzovaras

3. Home institution / affiliation

The Alan Turing Institute

4. Session collaborators
Please include First Name, Surname, Home institution/affiliation and Email address for any additional collaborators on this session proposal, each on a separate line.

Georgia Aitkenhead, MB, BGT (do we want to invite others? - we already had an open call in the meet-up session and newsletter but we could reach out to people individually too?)

5. Mini-workshop or demo session title
*
If your session is accepted this title will be made public on the CW24 website.

"Community Co-creation"

6. Mini-workshop or demo session abstract
*
**If your session is accepted this abstract will be made public on the CW24 website, so please write this as a public description containing 200-400 words.**

Research and technology are increasingly pushed towards delivering "real world impact", but this push can be a double edged sword: New technology can offer large opportunities for positive change, but also risks embedding and deepening societal issues, for example of access, power and understanding. These risks are particularly pronounced when there is a divide between the people who create technology and research and those who will ultimately be affected by them. In this context, co-creating research and technology with the communities of people who the results are supposed to serve offers one way of responding to this risk. In the context of research software, this can mean engaging directly with a range of people who may not be professional developers themselves, but are the ultimate users or affected by the use of software – to work together to make sure tools are built for and with them.

In this workshop will explore some of the possibilities of community co-creation, founded on the “nothing about us without us” philosophy of the disability rights movement. This approach is informed by our work with AutSPACEs, a co-created online citizen-science platform designed to investigate sensory processing and autism. Our workshop will kick off by providing some background on the potential and challenges of participatory research co-design using our own work as a point of departure. From this, we will engage in an open-ended, facilitated discussion around two main questions related to co-designing research & technology:

1. What are the potential benefits of doing co-design in the field of RSE?
2. What challenges do you expect, or have you experienced, with doing co-design and how could they be addressed?

Our aim for this session is two-fold: 1. to leave participants with additional knowledge and skills to start thinking about implementing or deepening co-creation in their own work, and 2. to foster bi-directional learning and collective interrogation of the concepts and practice of community co-creation.

Our session plan itself is the outcome of a co-creation process witin our AutSPACEs community and we plan to present the results of it back to our wider community. We will also take collective notes during the discussion sessions, which we will openly publish. This session will be hybrid in order to maximise accessibility. We will also use or experience of facilitating diverse groups to support diverse inclusion.

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7. Mini-workshop or demo session audience
*
If your session is accepted this description of the intended audience for this session will be made public on the CW24 website to help participants choose which sessions to attend. Please include any prerequisites for participants, expected prior knowledge/skills needed, if any software/tools need to be installed prior to the session, or if there is a maximum/expected number of participants if necessary.

There are no prerequisites for attending the workshop. We also do not require participants to have any tools other than the ability to join a video conference call. Our session is open to anyone with any level of experience in community co-creation: from those who have no prior experience or knowledge but are curious to find out more, to those who are experienced practitioners. The open discussion format is designed to allow us to learn from each other as a group.

In order to ensure that all attendees can have the chance to take part in discussion sessions and that we have sufficient facilitation support, we would limit the maximum number of in-person plus online participants to 40, combined.

We have experience of facilitating inclusive, online community discussions and we are happy to support anyone with specific accessibility requirements.

8. Mini-workshop or demo session theme(s)
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Which of the CW24 themes does your mini-workshop or demo session fit into? (Select all that apply.)
Environmental Sustainability (e.g. environmental impact of your hardware and code, training and education about environmentally sustainable behaviour)
AI/ML tools for science (e.g. benefits and limitations of using AI/ML tools, ethical considerations, and training and education around the usage and impact of AI/ML tools)
**Citizen science (e.g. designing participatory research projects, the role of research software in citizen science projects)**

Other:
9. Mini-workshop or demo session length
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Please choose the session length.

30-minute sessions are more suitable for demonstrations or presentations with minimal participant interaction (such as 20-25 minutes of show-and-tell of an approach, project, or product with 5-10 minutes of Q&A, for example).

60-minute sessions are more suitable for training, tutorials, information gathering or exploring a topic, for example, and are required to include active participant engagement/interaction (inclusive of both in-person and remote participants).
30 minutes
**60 minutes**

10. Mini-workshop or demo session description
*
**Please describe your session's aims and outcomes, how the session connects to the themes of CW24, how the session will run (tentative format/agenda), and how the session will be inclusive of both in-person and remote participants. If you are proposing a 60-minute session, please outline how you plan to facilitate active participant engagement/interaction with both in-person and remote participants.**

This session aims to open a broad discussion around the opportunities and benefits of collaborative co-creation, with an emphasis on bi-directional learning. We will depart from our own work in co-creating AutSPACEs – a citizen science platform which has been co-designed with a community of autistic people and a broad set of allies – to set the scene to discuss the benefits of doing co-creation as well as the challenges to implement such approaches in different research settings. The facilitators of the session are participatory research and citizen science practitioners as well as citizen science participants themselves.

Citizen science is a topic of increasing interest and importance, and it is recognised as a means of including a broader range of people and perspectives in the conducting of research and the creation of research tools. Community co-creation represents a particularly deep and embedded form of citizen science that allows for diverse inclusion, with the potential of providing routes for participants to have the capacity not just to contribute to outputs but to be empowered to have positions of leadership and direct influence, shaping the direction and methods of the workflow and having genuine decision-making power over priorities and outcomes. For this reason, community co-creation as a theme helps to focus the broad topic of citizen science by emphasising a particularly embedded and thorough approach. Such depth of inclusion comes with its own range of complexities and difficulties. As such, this session will focus on both benefits and challenges.

The session will be hybrid to maximise accessibility. We will have at minimum two facilitators present, one who will facilitate the in-person discussions and one who will host online discussions. They will be responsible for making sure everyone gets heard. It will consist of 4 parts:

Firstly, we will deliver a brief introduction into community co-creation practices as a subset of citizen science practices more broadly. Using real examples from AutSPACEs, we will demonstrate how community co-creation as a method for conducting research can be combined with co-designing an online software tool, to expand and broaden the kinds of data we can collect. This brief presentation will open out into more general themes and queries to catalyse further discussion on the two main questions in breakout rooms and smaller groups in-person.

In these subgroups/breakouts we will then discuss the question of “What are the potential benefits from doing co-design?”. This discussion will be open to contributions from all attendees and is designed to encourage mutual learning and to be inclusive to participants with any level of prior knowledge. After this breakout we will come back together to share highlights from the subgroup conversations before then moving into smaller breakouts again.

In this second facilitated discussion session, which will follow the same format and principles, we will be asking, What challenges do you expect, or have you experienced, with co-design? to provide space to both share real-world challenges that people have experienced as well as discuss potential issues people might forsee. After this, we will conduct a final share out session, in which we will come back together as a whole group, and highlight some of the main themes of the discussions. This will include sharing highlights of in-person discussions to the in-person group and vice versa. During the discussion session, we will take notes on a shared Google Doc, and encourage attendees to also write notes, with the aim of publishing these openly after the event, so long as we have the consent of attendees.

With this workshop, we aim to give those new to community co-creation a sense of the possibilities and challenges so they can potentially incorporate elements into their own work. We also aim to give those with prior experience an opportunity to share their learnings with others and to learn from group insights. Bringing people together to discuss this topic will also provide an opportunity for future collaborations to be forged. We also plan to use the notes to write up a collective blog post (given permission from attendees), e.g. on the SSI website about community co-creation.

The session has been designed collaboratively with the AutSPACEs community following our own participatory philosophy.

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11. Any special requirements or other information you would like to include about your proposed session?
For example, will you need extra helpers provided or a specific technical setup? Will you need use of the CW24 Sli.do?

We will only need tools to connect the in-person attendees to the online attendees. Ideally, we would allow online participants to share out to the room in the final part of the session too.

12. Should our reviewers feel your workshop is more aligned with RSECon24 than CW24, could we pass your details onto the RSECon24 team?
**Yes**
No