Category: development

How to navigate the challenges of corporate-academia research partnerships

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Many research projects draw on sources of funding from the corporate world. Fola Adeleke discusses the challenges inherent to this kind of research and outlines three key considerations for researchers engaging with corporate partners.   Corporate-acad…

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Book Review: New Mediums, Better Messages? How Innovations in Translation, Engagement and Advocacy are Changing International Development edited by David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock

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In New Mediums, Better Messages?, editors David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock explore how international development is being represented and understood through new insights from practitioners working across a range of communications media….

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Working with serendipity to produce impact

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Impact does not always arise as a primary objective of research. Naomi Pendle, who has been researching South Sudan’s local justice system for a decade, has had a significant impact on the World Food Programme’s warning systems for famine in the countr…

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Do no harm? – What development practice can teach us about negative impact

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As previous posts on the Impact Blog have highlighted, one aspect of the impact agenda that has until recently been relatively neglected has been that of negative impact, or ‘grimpact’. In this post Valeria Izzi and Becky Murray draw on examples from development practice and research to advance a more complex understanding of grimpact and argue that as development research […]

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DMPonline user group: where next?

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We’ve run a couple of user group sessions over the last few weeks. Many thanks to those who attended in Amsterdam and Manchester. It was particularly helpful to hear how you are using the tool and what changes you would like. The DCC team met on Monday to process your feedback and have set the following priorities:

  1. Full text API (#2086)
    You wanted an extension of the plans API to allow authorised admin users to pull out the full text of DMPs for their organisation. Sam has already developed this but it takes a long time to run in real-time so we are going to harvest the data overnight. This requires some changes to our infrastructure but we should be able to release the API later this month.

  2. Reviewer admin permission (#2087)
    It seems that many of you have multiple reviewers of plans and would like this to be a separate role that can be assigned by the org admin. We’re in the process of adding this, and will adjust our contract so you’re not paying more for multiple plan reviewers.

  3. Adding a field for School / Division / Department (#2088)
    We plan to add one field to the edit profile page for which you can name and define a controlled value list. This will allow you to identify the sub-unit affiliation of your users. In time we could extend the functionality to allow you to pull stats on this (e.g. plans by school) and to allow customisations to be done by sub-unit level. Currently it is only the guidance that works in their vein.

  4. Conditional questions (#1772)
    This is a bigger piece of feature development, which we have scheduled for the summer months. It was top priority for you so we will add it first.

  5. Custom section on funder templates (#2072)
    Many of you have the same custom section on funder templates and want to create it once and apply across all / a selection. This will be provided as a new feature in Summer 2019.

  6. Plan versioning 
    Again, this is a bigger piece of feature development, which we have scheduled for the summer months.

There were a number of smaller items raised during discussion too. These have been added as tickets (see the ‘user group’) label and will be addressed during the coming few sprints.

Other areas of interest which represent larger feature development and are to be placed into development plans have been captured on the ‘Future enhancements’ section of the wiki for now.
 
Manchester’s case study on using DMPonline was really inspiring and we wanted to ask how we can support others to do some similar things. We realise not everyone has development effort in-house so we wondered whether it would help if we wrote a script to send you weekly/monthly email notifications of new users and plans so you can monitor usage and start to interact with and assist users more? Let us know what you think.
 
We are due to push out a new release immediately after Easter. Amongst other things, this includes:
  • bug fixes for guidance / comment display when text runs outside the box
  • adjustments to comment notification so users don’t receive multiple emails when you provide feedback
  • display of themed guidance in ‘customise template’ preview
  • table-styling fixes
  • plans by template statistics

You can see these on the test site now and in live deployment soon.

All feedback welcome!
 
Magdalena, Diana, Sam & Sarah
 

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Roadmap back to school edition

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Summer activities and latest (major 2.0.0) release The DMPRoadmap team is checking in with an overdue update after rotating holidays and work travels over the past few months. We also experienced some core team staff transitions and began juggling some … Continue reading →

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