The Impact of Sharing Knowledge

Knowledge-impact is a one-month project created in collaboration between open summer of code, Departement Economy, Science & Innovation Flanders, Flanders Research Information Space and Ghent University Library, Boekentoren. It has been created by a team of six students, with all different backgrounds, called "Team Siesta".

The students discovered a lot of researchers undergo huge amounts of pressure, and their research remains unread after years of hard work. They created this project to help researchers create more visibility, connect to others and grow without adding additional pressure through linking metadata from publications inside the Biblio and the FRIS platforms.

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Video: mock-ups

The project

On the platform researchers can find a personalized feed with recommendations of conferences to go to, publications to read, articles of extracurricular work and researchers to connect with.

The researchers will grow because of a timeline of their career and an overview of their progress with metrics, which also include tips on how to increase these. By giving them the option to choose what data they wish to see on the platform we remove added pressure.

All these features make sure that there will be more action on the platform which goes hand in hand with the visibility of the researchers.

The team conducted desk research to find out how and where to support researchers, and recommend knowledge institutions that hire these researchers to do the same. By conducting user interviews and tests on wireframes and mock-ups, the team discovered what worked and what did not. These provide useful insights in the future of how knowledge institutions can approach supporting researchers practically.

Poster: recommendations for knowledge institutions

Video: Dashboard prototype

To prove what was possible with the current data availale, the team ran experiments with the data the two knowledge institutions Ghent University Library, Boekentoren and the Flanders Department of Economy, Science & Innovation provided. This data was gathered by the tools Biblio and Flanders Research portal (FRIS).

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The team

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