Continuing ResearchOps
ResearchOps - Kate Towsey at UX Brighton 2018
About this talk
In March 2018, the ResearchOps Community was formed with the intention of validating and shaping the practice of ResearchOps. Since then, the Community Slack has grown to 1000+ members and many more are part of the conversation in person or on Twitter.
Core to the Community has been a global research initiative called #WhatisResearchOps. A team of 60 researchers have worked together to run 32 workshops around the world to ask researchers about their challenges and triumphs, and their expectations of ResearchOps. To make sure we reached people who couldn’t get to a workshop, we also ran a survey. In total, more than 800 people have taken part in the initiative.
In this talk, Kate shared the background to the Community, what they’ve learned from #WhatisResearchOps, and the first iteration of the framework. Kate spoke on behalf of TeamReOps: all the organisers and thinkers from around the world who’ve donated countless hours to the effort and are making ResearchOps what it is today.
Methods mentioned
Related reading
Papers and articles
Concepts
- ResearchOps00:29
- 1-2-4-All18:47
- Affinity diagrams19:30
- Knowledge management31:16
- Research repositories31:49
- Information architecture33:48
- Servant leadership27:21
- Finding participants for user research29:31
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike18:03
People
Projects and resources
About Kate
Kate believes that in order for research to be truly valuable, it must be done thoroughly, professionally, and securely. She creates labs, panels and archives that are carefully designed to meet demanding specifications, sometimes assembled with minimal resources, but never compromising quality.
Working freelance, Kate refuses to fit neatly within job titles. Instead, she takes an entrepreneurial approach to her work with government, agencies, universities, broadcasters and others. The BBC and Co-Op are the current beneficiaries of Kate’s exacting approach.

