The project recently held its first expert workshop to explore the monographs problem space.

With this first workshop we wanted to begin surfacing as many of the possible problems that the monograph strategy might need to address – the project tried not to constrain the discussions or problem statements too much; at this stage we want to get as many of the problems out in the open as possible, we can do the refining, editing and prioritising later.

The workshop was very participant led, and used a version of the open-space technology approach for the meeting.

This provided the project with an opportunity to make sure the participants could lead on the discussions and we would be able to capture the kinds of problems that they wanted to discuss and note down.

These problems were then mapped against some headline themes: Create, Publish, Receive and Store, Access, and Use.

The day ended with participants voting on their top 3 problems (these are the green post-it notes), and noting why they were voting for that particular problem.

 

Below is a ‘booklet’ with all the problem statements that were produced on the day in their raw, unadulterated form.

A challenge

You can see where the participants have placed their votes for the top problems a monographs strategy needs to address.

Now we’d like to know what yours are – there’s a full list at the National monographs Strategy project Ideascale site where you can vote on your top three.

It’s probably worth noting that two of the highest voted problems aren’t on that list, these were:

1. Who is the NMS for? Understanding the NMS vision from different stakeholder perspectives: What are the benfits and incentives (and who pays)?
2. Defining the ‘National’ in National Monographs Strategy: This is a very similar question to above, but who’s the strategy for?

We have decided that these problems are so fundamental to the project that they have to be addressed in order to develop a successful strategy – We simply have to do them!

So… We’d love to hear from you on your top three problems, so feel free to take a look at Ideascale and vote on the ones you feel are critical: http://monographs.ideascale.com/

Or comment below and add one we haven’t got yet. 

 

Finally – These problems are still in their raw and unrefined condition (but, I think you’ll agree there not bad for a one-day workshop, especially given the number of statements that were produced) so over the coming weeks the NMS team will be refining these statements so we have a set of clear problems with which we can kick-off our second workshop to begin exploring the solutions space.

We’ll be posting the refined versions of the problems very shortly.