Impact of RCMs

Impact of RCMs#

Note: This page synthesises the Turing’s Research Community Management team’s quarterly reports from 2021 and 2024. The Turing Way project reports and the team’s briefing notes are not included in full.

An RCM team created value for an institution in six ways. Each section below states the value, then gives examples from the Turing.

Summary#

The team grew from a handful of project-embedded community managers into a recognised core capability of about nine people, working across health, environment, engineering, AI adoption, arts and humanities, and open-science programmes. Its reports support five conclusions:

RCMs made projects and partnerships more visible, connected, and reusable.
RCMs converted project know-how into institution-wide and public assets, mostly published openly with DOIs.
RCMs helped win and shape funding by writing community and skills work packages or serving as co-investigators.
RCMs buily credibility for the role itself through frameworks, position papers, and advisory roles.
Impact depended ultimate on institutional conditions: sponsorship, remit, lead time for approvals, and stable funding.

How the team evolved#

Period	Shape of the team	Notes
Q1 2022	Lead, 2 senior CMs, and 4 CMs; EDoN, Turing-RSS Health Data Lab and DECOVID, Turing-Roche, ASG, The Turing Way, and AIM-RSF hired roles in 2021-2022
Q2–Q3 2022	Lead, 2 senior CMs, and 5 CMs	Team formalised themselves through fortnightly strategy meetings, weekly team coordination, knowledge based in a shared GitHub repository and internal information management
Q4 2022–Q1 2023	Team remained stable except one role ended due to project’s conclusion	Named a core capability in the Turing 2.0 strategy alongside the RAM team
Apr–Sep 2023	Lead, 3 Senior RCMs (Health, TRIC:DT, DCE), and 4 RCMs	The EDoN project concluded, AIM-RSF Open Collaboration CM left in November 2023
Oct 2023–Mar 2024	Lead, 3 Senior RCMs, and 3 RCMs	The Environment and Sustainability Grand Challenge senior RCM post was filled internally
Apr–Sep 2024	Lead, 5 Senior RCMs (Health, E&S, DCE, BridgeAI, Arts and Humanities), and 3 RCMs	One RCM was promoted to Senior RCM, and there was a brief secondment from the research engineering group

The operating model that worked#

Embedded RCMs plus a central layer. Each RCM reported to a project or programme, with a team lead and a senior RCM tier that managed different RCMs. The senior tier met fortnightly on strategy, the whole team met weekly for updates and co-working, and periodic team days covered important but non-urgent work.
Shared infrastructure. RCMs shared processes through a public GitHub repository, a centralised outputs sheet, a team wiki, and The Turing Way.
Pairing with other roles. Working with Research Application Managers (RAMs) and research engineers was productive project by project, for example on Data Safe Haven, ADViCE, and the E&S stakeholder map. No institution-level coordination for these groups existed, though internal efforts were there to align scopes.
Structured onboarding. The team used surveys for projects planning to hire an RCM, onboarding manuals, a community-research toolkit for new RCMs, and line-management and mentoring chains within programmes.

1. Stronger, more engaged communities around projects#

Value: Projects and partnerships reach more of the right people, keep them engaged, and become visible externally.

Initiative	What RCMs enabled
Turing-Roche Strategic Partnership	Slack grew from about 430 to 954 members and the newsletter from 185 to 300+ subscribers. The Knowledge Share series drew 240+ sign-ups at launch and 43–54 organisations per event later. A Community Scholars scheme supported 10 PhD students. The partnership won the Praxis Auril Strategic Partnership Award (2023), with community management highlighted in the entry.
Clinical AI Interest Group	Membership grew from about 300 to nearly 1,000, with about 100 attendees per monthly meeting, two summer schools, a spin-off AI for Women’s Health group, and town halls on upskilling with 100+ attendees from regulators, the NHS, and industry.
AIM-RSF (NIHR-funded research support facility)	An ECR committee, in-person conferences, an R workshop series, and a PPIE Community of Practice of 150+ members across 27 projects. A co-created plain-language glossary and a Zenodo community made outputs findable.
Data-Centric Engineering	DCE 2.0 launched with the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, an accreditation initiative with the Royal Academy of Engineering, and an invitation to chair IEEE CAI 2025.
Environment and Sustainability	A public stakeholder map attracted DEFRA interest, and the Climate Informatics 2024 conference drew 150+ registrations with open-by-design submissions and artefact evaluation.
BridgeAI, Data/Culture, People in Data	Advisor community calls, an SME case-study programme, a UK-wide group of 25+ arts and humanities and RSE leaders, and a first working group of 20 partner organisations.
Data Safe Haven and SATRE	A Collaboration Café with 40+ trusted research environment experts and a community-governed specification repository.

Lesson: The team tracked engagement types and numbers - quality was not always captured except for through event event specific feedback which were not centralised.

2. Reusable knowledge and open infrastructure#

Value: Solutions built for one project become assets that other projects, and the public, can adopt without starting from scratch.

Process and governance templates: project and repository templates, the all-contributors bot, project-scoping templates, onboarding manuals, and surveys that prepare projects to host an RCM.
Formats that spread: the Collaboration Café was adopted by AIM-RSF, Scivision, the Environmental Data Science Book, and SATRE. A case-study framework and a stakeholder-mapping workflow with data-protection review were published on Zenodo.
Turing Way chapters: academic-industry partnerships, ambassador schemes, inclusive events, public involvement, RCM chapters, and containerised workflows. Lessons from sensitive or closed projects were shared as generic, transferable chapters.
Tools and demos: the ADViCE knowledge base, an interactive explainer on structured missingness, and the AIM glossary website.

Lesson: Make everything reusable by default. Open-by-default working gave the team external visibility and made outputs easy to build on.

3. Funding, leverage, and strategic positioning#

Value: Community and skills work packages make bids stronger, and RCMs help turn programme goals into fundable, deliverable plans.

Funding	Role of RCMs
The Turing Way Practitioners Hub	£122,003 (FY22-23), £362,074 underwritten (FY23-24), and £560,449 (2024 onwards); funded a technical writer, a researcher, a research project manager, and a senior RCM.
People in Data (EPSRC)	£1.7M over three years; the community-building work package was written by an RCM, who was also Co-I (0.3 FTE).
Skills Policy Award	£64k; produced the RCM skills framework, personas, a workshop of 40–45+ experts, and a two-part podcast.
Data Science Without Borders (Wellcome)	About £5M over three years, with an RCM as Co-I leading the open-science working group. The Turing later discontinued the partnership in 2024.
MRC Biomedical Data Science Leadership Award	Invited to full application and reported as awarded in 2024, pending internal approval.

Other contributions include a successful Research England grant for Hidden REF, a UKRI community work package for TEA-DT, and community roles in UKRI health AI bids.

These are headline values of projects the team contributed to, not RCM-attributable income.

4. Skills, training, and capacity building#

Value: Researchers, students, and partners gain practical open research skills, and new audiences enter the research ecosystem.

Community management training for 16 staff in 2022, with Slack-based follow-up.
AI and Data Science Educators Programme, run with the Skills team, with 50+ international participants.
Open, FAIR, and reproducible research workshops for doctoral programmes, enrichment students, and a Data Study Group course (35+ students).
Widening Participation summer schools that introduced under-represented teenagers to Git and GitHub, supported by a reusable open curriculum.
Peer and ECR support: lunchtime series, grant-writing and narrative CV workshops, PPIE skills sessions for public contributors, and mentoring of enrichment students.
Training for project leaders, piloted with senior postdocs and infrastructure staff.

6. Professionalising the role and shaping the field#

Value: Recognised roles, skills frameworks, and evidence help institutions hire, fund, and retain research technical professionals.

Frameworks and papers: an RCM skills framework compared against the Alliance for Data Science standards, Data Science Team Personas (230+ downloads within months), the position paper Professionalising Community Management Roles in Interdisciplinary Research Projects, and Unicorns Do Not Exist on employing community managers in open source.
Panel and advisory roles: EPSRC and NWO review panels, an ELIXIR focus group on professionalising careers, and the Hidden REF committee.
Policy input: written evidence to the House of Lords LLM inquiry, input to the Royal Society’s Science in the age of AI, and responses to the UNESCO call for open science practices.
External uptake: Cancer Research UK, the Oxford Big Data Institute, and Genomics England asked for advice on setting up similar roles.
Institutional recognition: the team was named a core capability in the Turing 2.0 strategy in 2023, and featured in the 2023–24 annual report.

Headline numbers#

Measure	Value as reported
Reporting span	January 2022 to September 2024 (8 periodic reports)
Team size	About 8 (2022) to about 9 including the lead (2024), with 3–4 departures along the way
Turing-Roche Slack members	About 430 (2022) to 954 (March 2024)
Turing-Roche newsletter	185 to 300+ subscribers
Clinical AI Interest Group members	About 300 (Q1 2023) to about 1,000 (March 2024)
PPIE Community of Practice	150+ members across 27 projects
Turing Way talks and workshops	19 in Q3 2022; about 70 in 2023 (project-wide)
Practitioners Hub	Cohort 1 (2023): 5 case studies and a showcase attended by 80; Cohort 2 (2024): 40 Experts in Residence and 20 companies
Funding secured (headline)	See funding, leverage, and strategic positioning
Skills Policy outputs	A workshop of 40–45+ experts; personas with 230+ downloads
Widening Participation	3 groups (2023) and 4 weekly sessions (2024)
Awards	Praxis Auril Strategic Partnership Award; KEA finalist

What made the impact possible#

Embedding in a funded project with a named community and clear goals. Turing-Roche, the Practitioners Hub, and Clinical AI produced the strongest results.
Open-by-default working. Public repositories, Zenodo deposits, and recordings made outputs reusable.
A shared handbook and a flagship community. The Turing Way let the team share lessons from closed projects as generic chapters.
A central team layer. A lead, fortnightly senior meetings, team days, and a shared repository spread templates, onboarding, and peer review.
Links to Skills, Communications and Events, research engineering, and research application management teams. These turned community activity into training, publicity, and technical delivery.
Senior sponsorship. Programme leads who asked for RCMs, and funders who named community in awards, correlated with the visible wins.

Conditions that limited impact#

Issue	What happened	What to do
Approval timelines	A scholar scheme took several months to approve, and a data-sharing agreement was delayed by about six months.	Budget lead time, involve legal and data-protection staff early, and reuse approved templates.
Leadership buy-in and authority	Some RCMs had limited influence over project direction and were brought in after decisions were made without community involvement.	Define remit, decision rights, and reporting lines at hiring.
Capacity	Requests exceeded capacity, and a mentorship request was declined.	Scope by project, and offer drop-ins and institute-wide cafés.
Attrition	Three RCMs left, citing project uncertainty of their roles due to institutional strategy change and better external offers.	Offer a career ladder and plan handovers.
Funding and strategy shocks	In 2024, roles rolled off or were paused, a partnership was discontinued, and recruitment was frozen.	Do not make RCM roles depend on programmes, instead have institutional plans.
RCM and other specialised role alignment	No institution-level model was agreed and the members were navigating their partnership in projects. it worked when members had collaborative approach, however in some cases there were different goals being pursued by members with different soecialisations.	Define complementary roles before projects begin.
Data protection	Several programmes though planned to publish their work or had their research output published, other resources were not always auditable.	Include tool and data-handling standards in the RCM toolkit.
Resistance to open practice	Some teams did not take up support to make their work open or contribute d best practices to The Turing Aay.	Pair training with incentives and leadership endorsement.

Recommendations for institutions#

Position RCMs as research technical professionals with a skills framework, a career ladder (RCM, Senior RCM, lead), and a clear remit.
Embed RCMs in projects with explicit community goals and sponsor support, and add a central team for standards, mentoring, and shared infrastructure.
Fund a pooled core so that the capability survives changes in programmes.
Build in setup time for legal, data-protection, and finance approvals.
Pair RCMs with research application managers and research software engineers, and document the workflow before the project starts.
Measure outcomes early. Move from counts of events and members to indicators such as collaborations formed, funding leveraged, reuse of outputs, retention of community members, and partner satisfaction.
Make everything reusable: repositories, templates, case-study frameworks, and onboarding surveys.
Offer institute-wide services such as drop-ins, Collaboration Cafés, and training to extend reach beyond funded projects.