Facilitation · University of Sheffield
Participatory Research and the Open Research Agenda
“Everyone must be able to enter, access and have a stake - workshop participant”
The challenge
Open research can treat openness as inherently good while participatory research asks who benefits and who carries the risk
Open-research agendas encourage sharing data, methods and outputs, but openness is not neutral. Communities may want control over sensitive knowledge, funders may require data sharing that participants never anticipated, and digital ‘access’ can still exclude people outside universities. Participatory research has its own tensions around representation and accountability. Sheffield wanted a space where these communities could examine those contradictions together.
What we did
Researchers mapped frictions, worked through real scenarios and designed principles for ethical openness
Open Routes Research designed and facilitated a three-hour workshop for participatory researchers, open-research advocates, research-support staff and colleagues working in ethics and governance. Participants mapped where the two agendas converge and conflict, worked through scenarios involving open data and community control, and used visual methods to build a shared roadmap. The workshop repeatedly returned to four questions: open how, to what extent, to whom, and for what purpose?
What changed
The workshop reframed openness around community control, institutional access and accountability
Participants challenged narrow definitions of openness focused on making research products digitally available at the end of a study. The discussion expanded openness to include who can physically enter universities, who can shape methods, who owns data and who decides when protection is more ethical than sharing. The workshop generated propositions for future institutional discussion and possible public outputs.
Outputs
Interactive workshop; scenario exercises; visual maps and roadmap; material for follow-on blog, zine or publication