Sensemaking Workshop Recap

As part of the POSE project the team has been holding sensemaking workshops focused on different topics.

Over the past month, members of the ecosystem have attended workshops to learn about preliminary findings from the project’s discovery interviews and work together to generate ideas that could result in a larger number of people becoming and remaining active contributors in the CKAN ecosystem.

The workshops were organized around the following themes, (the summary of each workshop will be added as they are completed):

• Onboarding new contributors - The sustainability of an open source software product depends on many different individual contributions. Open source ecosystems are reliant on people that produce and test code, write documentation, build community, manage communications, and spend time engaged in stewardship and governance activities. Providing people with encouragement and support can help them to not only become contributors to CKAN, but assume a leadership role in the ecosystem. In this workshop, we’ll learn more about everyone’s experience contributing to the CKAN ecosystem. We’ll draw from these experiences to identify opportunities to use Phase II POSE funding to meaningfully engage more people in the work of the ecosystem, and develop additional pathways and support for the ecosystem’s next generation of leaders.
  Review the summary of the workshop

• Adoption of CKAN as a data management solution - In this workshop, we’ll explore resources needed for successful adoption and maintenance of CKAN and learn more about the available resources (“scaffolding”) that the CKAN project has developed to facilitate adoption. Attendees will also have the opportunity to discuss resources they have developed in their programs and to identify ways to contribute to the growth and resilience of the CKAN ecosystem. We will also talk about ways that the ecosystem can better support the needs of existing CKAN users into the future.
  Review the summary of the workshop

• Community building - Relationships are vital to well-functioning open-source software ecosystems. CKAN’s success as a product depends on a strong network of connections between developers, community-builders, funders, adopters, and end-users. Strengthening the bonds between people all across the CKAN ecosystem will result in a resilient product that meets the needs of the user community whose development is shared across a larger number of contributors. In this workshop, we’ll talk about ways that strategic investments in the CKAN ecosystem can help to develop and strengthen the relationships and flow of information between people that steward, develop, maintain, and use the product.
  Review the summary of the workshop

• Open discussion - The week of July 24, we are holding time to explore additional topics that members of the CKAN ecosystem may be interested in talking about. We would love to learn about your additional ideas for the kinds of investments and initiatives that could further strengthen the CKAN ecosystem.
  Review the summary of the workshop

The findings from the workshops will help identify investment opportunities that can be included in a Phase II implementation grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.