Beyond project dissemination ¹

Dissemination is a key part of the project(s) that are supporting this forum, and each have their strategy for going about talking about the respective projects. However keeping up community engagement needs more than a single avenue of communication, no matter how refined. I’d like to keep track here of press clippings, community blogs, single articles on community or mainstream news outlets - both online and offline.

The projects will come to an end, but as we’ve said before, we want this forum to continue for some time thereafter. Although they will certainly have the project blogs directly on their websites, which will communicate the project itself , we need to keep in mind that there’s more to life than even the most interesting navel

Open to Contributors

To paraphrase a common proverb

If you want something (like this) done, you’d best (not) do it yourself.

Let me clarify: I think that the most impactful stories about our work will be written by others about their own interest in the topics we address. This means

1. not monopolising the discussion
2. leaving the door open to others to write about what they’re doing
3. engaging with individuals with an interesting point of view

Importantly, though, we need to keep track of these contributions of what may perhaps be termed grey dissemination . There are a few channels which I suggest.

Medium

Medium “ connects people, stories and ideas that matter to you ” . What sets it apart from Blogspot and Wordpress are it’s publications, which are inherently linked to conversations . We have two publications so far on Medium:

1. Open Science in Africa
2. The Open Science Commons for Research in Africa

We can use these to publish our articles, as well as invite others to publish theirs in our publication. This can help us build a network. Medium is a publishing platform, but also a communication platform - something you’d expect from the creators of

The AAROC blog

This is a blog which the members of the Regional Operations Centre can contribute to. This blog tells the story of e-Infrastructure in Africa, where it comes from, what’s currently happening and where it sees things going. Many of the articles are republished in Open Science in Africa . Contributions are simply commits or pull requsts to the repo , making it easy to contribute.

I’d like to be able to catalogue and link other interesting articles in this topic - please reply with suggestions at the topic on the forum

References and Footnotes

 Tagged with blog  •  dissemination  •  sci-gaia