Emmy Tsang, OSC Delft coordinator, shares some changes towards building a more scalable, inclusive and open community.
In June 2020, the TU Delft Data champions voted to rebrand their community to Open Science Community Delft (OSCD), an umbrella community of the International Network of Open Science Communities (INOSC). With this rebranding, we hope to widen our membership and scope, to learn and explore more diverse aspects of open science beyond data.
OSCD officially launched in September, 2020. Since then, we have been brainstorming: how do we structure our community to achieve our rebranding goal? I joined the community as its coordinator at this point; while I’m familiar with community strategies and methods, I lack knowledge of the history and culture of the TU Delft community. I spent the past 4 months talking: open science programme team members, data stewards, research support staff, and most importantly, data champions and researchers, to understand the needs and wants of various stakeholders.
The changes below is the result of what I learnt in these conversations - they focus on making the community:
- Scalable: a scaffold that can be expanded as the community expands in membership and interests
- Inclusive: not exclusive to “champions”, but everyone with an interest to learn
- Open: we have discussions and conversations in the open to allow more people to contribute and engage; we acknowledge and reward individual contributions.
These changes are nowhere going to pave the perfectly smooth road- they are experiments to be tested (with time) and learnt from, designs to be revised as more of us voice our ideas and take leadership roles.
A version 1 of our new community website + Twitter!
This is a beginning to creating a home for our community 
Thank you very much to everyone who’ve contributed so far. This is by no means complete- more improvements and ideas are waiting to be realised 
. If you have ideas on how we can improve/would like to help, please submit an issue.
With this launch, we’ve started a new Twitter account @OSCDelft for our community! Follow up to stay updated on happenings and stories in our community and in the wider national and international open science world 
Data Champions will stay
I’ve realised that the data champions identity is special and worth keeping, and the expansion of our community doesn’t mean this has to go!
Data champions will become an initiative within OSC Delft- they will continue to advocate for and push forward open data and best data management practices.
- All data champion prior to rebranding will remain data champions
- If you are new to the community and would like to find out more about becoming a data champion, please email Emmy at f [dot] tsang [at] tudelft [dot] nl
- Likewise, email Emmy if you were a data champion but would like to stop being one (and instead explore other initiatives/build your own)
- There are/will be other initiatives, e.g. open hardware, open publishing, which can have different/overlapping memberships and goals. If you have ideas of open science activities/projects you would like to pursue, please feel free to use the community ideas sandbox for discussions or email Emmy. We’d love to learn how OSCD (as an umbrella for these initatives) can support you (more here).
Membership and mailing changes
Because of this structural change:
- We have created a new Open Science community newsletter, to be sent once every two months
- It is sent to all open science community members - we’ll look into how to make this newsletter better serve OSC Delft in the coming months
- The mailing list can only be used by community coordinator(s); Members can suggest/contribute items to the newsletter by submitting an issue to the newsletter repository. Newsletters are published online.
- Everyone on the data champions mailing list will be added to the open science community mailing list.
- We will keep the data champions mailing list, which stays for the use of communication between data champions
- Any mailings to that list will be related to data (while more general open science items will be on the open science newsletters).
- This allows for more different, speciaised newsletters in the future, e.g. open access & plan S