The project story

In November, 2018, volunteers gathered in the #skills-framework channel of the ResearchOps Community Slack group. Our aim was to create a researcher skills framework, helping researchers grow and charting the boundaries of research work.

We focused on these essential questions for practitioners at all levels of experience:
The project grew into a huge undertaking,

It is a volunteer-driven community initiative.
The project was scaffold-ed to be inclusive to different levels of involvement, and the sheer amount of work done was made possible by the collective energy of all of the contributors and their belief that this work is necessary.  

It isan opportunity to explore new perspectives about our work.
We strove to hold space for a new kind of conversation, where researched perspectives and structured ways of engagement guided streams of deep exchange. These conversations continue in the shape of new local communities being born, people gathering their colleagues to try the tools together, and ideas exchanged between new connections made in the past 1.5 years.

And it's our bid to help shape shape our growing field.
Through its execution alone, the project has reached over 500 practitioners around the world. Everything we produced, as much as it makes sense, has been made available to be used by any individual or organization. We hope to see the framework, either in its entirety or any of its concepts, be adopted and extended to support the growth of our field.

See also: A letter from the editors
Articles published along the way:
Public talks:

About the ResearchOps Community

We are a global group of people discussing the operations and operationalization of user research and design research — also known as ResearchOps. Say that the mission of a person who does ResearchOps is to help researchers do their best work. So, as a community, we often research the researchers.

The RSF project took a participatory approach to give structure to researcher skills, to release a framework that anyone can adapt for personal or organizational use. It’s not "Ops" work per se: but our community is well-positioned to make this contribution to the research discipline at large.

Find out more about the community→
ResearchOps community