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31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0 RCM Cooperative | Source & License: CORE Principles for building sustainable research communities December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0
December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 Communities we have managed Modelling and high-precision forecasting of complex environmental systems to make leaps in weather prediction and sustainable energy
31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 Research Community Managers foster a collaborative environment where a diverse community can access the socio-technical infrastructure and participatory processes they need to actively engage, gain recognition and build shared agency over their work. CC-BY 4.0 image by The Turing Way and Scriberia, Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3332807.
31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 CORE Principles for RCM C E R O Empower: Give members genuine agency, authority and mechanisms to shape the communities’ activity. Reward: Actively support, reward and celebrate all contributions, acknowledging that everything is valuable. Open: Ensure knowledge, processes and roadmaps are accessible, shared, and transparent whenever possible. Calibrate: Continuously measure interests, priorities and engagement, to understand and respond to your communities needs.
31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 Build trust ●Minimise information asymmetries ●Share roadmaps and progress towards milestones, with identifiable interaction points ●Be explicit about what information will remain confidential and why OPEN Support sustainability ●Document processes and decision making ●Aim for maximal reproducibility of activities and accessibility of materials ●Assume there will be turn over in maintainers and leaders
31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 Extrinsic motivators ●Understand how your community are motivated and build in meaningful benefits ●Acknowledge all contributions, especially outward-facing champions ●Aim for financial or time-based compensation for high expertise or workload tasks Intrinsic motivators ●Create a positive, welcoming and stimulating environment ●Tap into why people do this work and understand their core purpose ●Celebrate visibly and show your members you are gratitude for their contributions. REWARD
31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 EMPOWER Autonomy: Clear governance and decentralised decision making Collaboration: Practice and normalise and facilitate Engagement: Varied and accessible engagement opportunities which are intrinsically and extrinsically rewarding Build pathways and mechanisms for community members to move around in these dimensions. Potential community ‘leaders” will be high in all three; a leadership pipeline is essential for sustainability.
31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 Know community priorities ●Deliver what your community tell you they want (maximises engagement). ●Trust their expertise in the problem space and developing solutions ●Listen deeply and regularly Measure community health ●Know who is engaging and where ●Know who is not engaging ●Watch for indicators of leadership pipeline ●Carefully manage data about your community members CALIBRATE
31st October 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17489926 | CC-BY-4.0December 2025 | 10.5281/zenodo.17850246 | CC-BY-4.0 CORE Infrastructure ●Transparency and reproducibility mechanisms ●Attribution by default ●Engineered for collaboration ●Flexible and practical open/closed working spaces ●Low-effort engagement ●Easy to model and normalise behaviours (sharing, gratitude) ●Low effort self organising (new channels) ●Be aware of and mitigate techno-stress
