Cultivating an Open Data Community in a post-covid era

This talk was presented at the University of Manchester Open Research Conference, 9-10 June 2025.

Since the pandemic, many institutions have struggled with falling event attendance and engagement in Open Research practices. At Lancaster, we witnessed this with the declining numbers of researchers attending our Data Conversations programme and training sessions. In this paper, I aim to consider why we have had a drop-off in engagement and outline the ways in which we are reframing our research data management service. This talk explores the ways that we have focused on user experience to guide changes to our training offerings and sort to cultivate new collaborative networks with researchers across the university.