We hope everyone has had a restful break during the Easter holidays.

Our work towards our next business case is progressing. As mentioned in previous newsletters, it is a crucial time for community engagement. We want to ensure that your needs and priorities are at the heart of our business proposals. With this in mind, we would like to remind you of the upcoming workshops and engagement opportunities, and encourage you to take part and make your voice heard.

Lunch Event – Innovation communities (Project Q)

We still have a number of places still available for our RLP lunch event, focused on the ‘Design and implement a Research IT Innovation Community’ project (Project Q). This event is on Thursday 9 May and is open to anyone at the University with an interest in research. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Our lead speaker will be Dr Emma Finch, who is the Innovation Lead of the Research IT Innovation Community. Her focus so far has been identifying networking and collaboration opportunities currently being overlooked. She is developing a framework through which more research partnerships can be formed and innovation opportunities are identified and addressed.

Emma will be followed by additional speakers:

• Scott Taylor will be giving us an insight into metrics packages (such as SciVal and Altmetrics) which helps researchers find local and international collaboration opportunities with people with similar interests.
• Dr David Hodgetts will be talking about Virtual Reality Geological Studio (VRGS), an application which the University has helped Dave package as a product and is now licensed to oil companies and other academic users worldwide. VRGS uses point cloud and photogrammetry and can be used not just in geology, but in other areas of research too.

Sign up for this event:

• RLP Lunch Event

Find out more:

• Design and Implement a Research IT innovation community

Develop a service to manage restricted data (Project S) – Engagement Workshop

Are you conducting research on a sensitive topic? Do you require access to sensitive or restricted data from external organisations such as the NHS, schools, the police or other government agencies? Do you work with commercially sensitive information? 

If so, we would like to invite you to our breakfast workshop to have a chat with us about your experience and future requirement of accessing and managing restricted data for your research. This will be your opportunity to shape how the University supports researchers who work with restricted data.

Sign up to our workshop and let us know your ideas.

• Thursday 2 May (Kilburn Building)
• Tuesday 7 May (Roscoe Building)

To advise on whether your research uses sensitive of restricted data, read how the University classifies data into Unrestricted, restricted and highly restricted data classifications:

• Information security classification examples

Contact us for further information.

Find out more:

• Develop a service to manage restricted data

Facilitating research networking and collaboration (Project E) – Tool Testing

Our project on increasing researchers’ networking and collaborative capabilities (Project E), we are planning of testing various collaboration tools with different cohorts to identify requirements and possible collaboration tools to suit researchers’ needs.

We are inviting volunteer groups, provide us with their requirements, then test potential tools and assess their suitability. If you are a researcher who would benefit through the use of collaboration tools, both for internal and external collaborators then we encourage you to be involved in this crucial stage in the progress of the project and help to influence its outcomes.

For more information, please contact Bryan Archer.

Meanwhile, if you have ideas you want to discuss with us, do not hesitate to contact us at rlp@manchester.ac.uk

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