Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community

Thursday, August 27, 2020 • Advancing Research Community
Share the love for this talk
Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
Speakers: Brigette Metzler and Dana Chrisfield
Link:

Summary

The ResearchOps Community is more than halfway through their third global project, this one on Research Repositories. Join Dana Chrisfield and Brigette Metzler as they take you through a short tour of what the project team have done so far, what they've learned, and what's next.

Key Insights

  • Research repositories are inherently social tools that enable knowledge sharing beyond just storing data, requiring strategies to socialize and evangelize findings.

  • There is a significant operational divide between the skills researchers have and those needed to build and maintain effective research repositories.

  • Mature, well-funded research repositories are rare; many organizations rely on fragmented and informal systems like Google Drive or Airtable.

  • Research repositories must serve multiple user roles and use cases across the research lifecycle, balancing immediate evaluative insights with durable strategic knowledge.

  • A key challenge is incentivizing researchers to contribute consistently to repositories due to lack of direct benefit or recognition.

  • Good governance involving legal consent and data sharing policies is critical and complex, requiring regional and international compliance considerations.

  • The project developed a standardized vocabulary and taxonomy to enable consistent tagging and categorization of research artifacts.

  • The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted planned workshops but also emphasized the need for flexible digital collaboration and lowered community pressure.

  • Secondary researchers or communications specialists who manage repository knowledge socialization are rare but could greatly enhance repository effectiveness.

  • Open source tools like the consent form builder partnered with Consent Kit provide scalable legal frameworks for sharing user research ethically.

Notable Quotes

"Research repositories and libraries are social things — many teams look for best practices beyond just building a library."

"Put more in than you take out — that’s the rule of thumb I give for contributing to repositories."

"Having a repo isn’t the same as having a strategy for socializing and evangelizing the research."

"Maintaining a research repository often requires 100% manual participation from researchers, which can be hard to enforce."

"Research Ops needs an operational brain — it’s not the kind of brain researchers usually carry."

"We decided to take a broad definition of research repositories to lessen shame and embrace the complexity of current practices."

"There’s a tension in repositories having to serve immediate product decisions and more durable, strategic knowledge."

"Mature research repositories are rare, and return on investment depends heavily on scale, governance, and organizational structure."

"Researchers are often nervous about their research being used in the wrong way, so trust and communication matter."

"We partnered with Consent Kit to create and maintain an open source consent form builder that addresses multiple legal frameworks."

Ask the Rosenbot
Sam Proulx
Designing For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Erin Weigel
Failure Friday #6: 90% of Everything I Do is Either Broken or Pointless
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Stephen Anderson
Puzzled? How to Coordinate Humans for Complex Challenges
2021 • Enterprise Community
Christopher Taylor Edwards
Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Ari Zelmanow
Dark Side of Democratization
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Saara Kamppari-Miller
"Prototype" vs "Prototype"--Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Harry Max
Failure Friday #5: Lessons from a SaaS Design Failure
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Lin Nie
When Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Lavy Kumar
Future of Work
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Laura Weiss
There is No Playbook: Leader as Coach During Challenging Times
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Cennydd Bowles
Exit Interview #2: Rediscovering the ethical heart of design
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Mackenzie Cockram
Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live
2022 • QuantQual Interest Group
Mike Oren
Improving Democratized Research with CustomGPTs and Gems
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Ali Jeffery
How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Nicole Aleong
Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Christian Rohrer
Research Operations at Scale
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold

More Videos

Louis Rosenfeld

"We have got you covered with sketch notes, resource lists, session notes, videos, and decks all shared ASAP after presentations."

Louis Rosenfeld Bria Alexander

Day 1 Welcome

September 23, 2024

George Abraham

"The components you design in Sketch or XD come with matching coded components in the app builder, so what you design is what you get in code."

George Abraham Stefan Ivanov

Design Systems To-Go: Reimagining Developer Handoff, and Introducing App Builder (Part 2)

October 1, 2021

Jess Greco

"If I had waited for someone else to give me permission, I'd still be waiting. We'd all be waiting."

Jess Greco

Claiming your power: Practical tools for amplifying your unique voice

March 13, 2025

Robert Schwartz

"We are map makers… helping businesses understand their customers so they don’t make the wrong decisions or end up somewhere they don’t want to be."

Robert Schwartz

We're Here for the Humans

June 9, 2017

Nicole Aleong

"Potential refers to not yet actualized possibilities that may or may not come to fruition."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Mila Kuznetsova

"Power dynamics exist in every session. People don’t want to be embarrassed or feel put on the spot."

Mila Kuznetsova Lucy Denton

How Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices

March 9, 2022

John Mortimer

"It was the first time I’ve actually seen this work all put together like this."

John Mortimer Milan Guenther Lucy Ellis Patrick Quattlebaum

Panel Discussion

December 3, 2024

Sam Proulx

"The first organization to solve accessibility for new modalities like AR/VR will gain a massive, lasting advantage."

Sam Proulx

To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility

November 18, 2022

Josh Clark

"We wanted to create personality in interfaces without pretending they are human."

Josh Clark Veronika Kindred

Sentient Scenes and Radically Adaptive Experiences

June 11, 2025