We develop bespoke training to build capacity in research community management for your team or organisation.
Mentoring
We support continuous development of people with research community management responsibilities in cohorts and one-to-one.
Strategy
We conduct strategic research on your community to devise evidence-based strategy aligned with your organisational priorities.
Portfolio
Learn about the impact of our work
Administrative Data Research UK
Developing recommendations for sustainability of ADR UK communities
Project overview
In collaboration with ADR UK, RCM Cooperative facilitated the co-creation of a set of recommended operating principles (technical and socio-technical) for research communities working with administrative data.
We ensured the guidelines reflected the priorities of both ADR UK and the community leaders by developing a high degree of trust and alignment between all involved, using our deep expertise of working with academic communities and our inclusive collaboration approach.
Strategic objectives & methodology
We used a multi-modal engagement strategy to achieve four primary goals:
Network Seeding: Established a network of ADR UK community leaders from diverse sectors with four Nations representation.
Principles Development: Used an iterative prioritisation process to define generalisable operating principles for communities.
Capacity Building: Delivered foundational training in the skills, structures and staging required for effective research community management.
Equitable Collaboration: Provided experiential learning of equitable co-creation process, ensuring participants felt empowered as experts in the collaborative development of recommendations.
Recommendations for community success
Together we identified four essential pillars for the success of ADR UK’s research communities:
Collaborative Infrastructure: A critical requirement for robust digital and physical co-working spaces to ensure broad participation and opportunities for members to discover synergies.
Brand Visibility and Legitimisation: A desire for formal recognition by the funding body through visible branding and dedicated space on official platforms to enhance credibility with stakeholders.
Operational Efficiency: The adoption and communication of clear objectives, meeting agendas, and community charters to respect participant time and ensure high-value knowledge exchange.
Community-Led Missions: A strong preference for models where activities emerge organically from member interests rather than top-down prescriptions, aligning with academic freedom.
Outcomes
High Engagement: The programme attracted consistent participation throughout both the online and in‑person phases.
Knowledge Transfer: Participants reported that the activities meaningfully strengthened their understanding of how to build and support research communities.
Immediate Application: Many participants indicated they planned to put their learning into practice straight away, either in their day‑to‑day roles, in teaching, or within public‑facing research activities.
Empowerment: Participants felt their contributions were genuinely valued by ADR UK and that they were well supported to share their expertise.
Impact
Following the workshops, one participant was successfully awarded funds to set up the UK Data Linkage Community (UK DLC). The community lead and participant in our project, Mike Edwards had this to say about the impact of our work:
“Before this workshop, I was very unlikely to seek funding to establish a community. The course gave me the frameworks to clearly formulate my vision for the UK DLC, which was essential in presenting a successful proposal to funders, co-chairs and potential community members. Discussions with a diverse group of participants and the RCM Cooperative team helped me refine our goals and gave me the confidence to communicate my work across different audience levels. The ‘Empowered Groups’ participation framework really struck a chord, and has become the core narrative for our community development. It has also been really well received by the wider community and provides a lot of mutual benefits across the ecosystem.” (Mike Edwards, University of Swansea)
Further communities are soon to be launched, lead by the leaders we supported in this project! ❤️
What happened next
ADR UK have worked hard to develop their internal organisational policies to meet their communities need for ‘Brand Visibility and Legitimisation’. Some notable next steps planned by ADR UK include:
Recognition of communities with a formal ‘affiliate’ status;
A communities logo;
Listing on the ADR UK website;
Increased resourcing and strategic focus on supporting communities.
This work is a strong demonstration of ADR UK’s commitment to meet the needs voiced by their community leaders, building on the trust which is essential for successful community engagement.
RCM Cooperative’s specialised service model
RCM Cooperative provides the expertise necessary to scale these outcomes for your organisation:
RCM Training and skill-building: Programs of training, mentorship, and “Community Clinics”, to support community leaders in developing professional skill sets and navigation of community leadership issues as they arise.
Cohort development: Building connections and relationships between community leaders to strengthen their capacity for collaboration and collective action.
Collaboration Cafés: Facilitated online co-working to support complex co-creation into valuable community outputs.
Community data collection and communication: Community data management and interactive visualisations to monitor the impact of investment in your communities.
Define our direction, for the benefit of all members.
Step beyond traditional roles. Our cooperative invites you to lead from within, actively creating new opportunities and defining the strategic direction of our organization. Assume responsibility for initiatives that align with your unique interests, while significantly improving your capacity and shaping the landscape of our field.
In our cooperative, we don’t just find opportunities – we create them. Join a member-driven network focused on improving the capacity of every research community manager, ensuring you have the skills, support, and collective power to take charge of your professional journey.
Every partnership fuels our ability to empower research community managers and build a more resilient research ecosystem. Below are a few ways your organization can support our collective mission.
Allocate resources within your grant proposals for our membership or services. This directly invests in your team’s capacity for community management and supports our cooperative’s mission.
2. Discuss Your Community Strategy
Initiate a conversation with us about your organization’s specific needs for fostering effective and sustainable communities. We provide expert guidance and tailored solutions.
3. Share Our Story
Become an ambassador for our cooperative. By sharing our work with your networks, you help us connect with like-minded organizations and expand the reach of our capacity-building initiatives.
Alexandra Araujo alvarez
(she/her)
Core team
Alexandra is Senior Research Community Manager for BridgeAI at The Alan Turing Institute, where she supports UK organisations, particularly SMEs, to adopt and benefit from AI. She joined the Institute in 2023 as Research Project Manager for The Turing Way, where she supported the launch of the Practitioners Hub and contributed to the project professionalising infrastructure and research roles in data science.
Before moving into research, Alexandra led as CEO of a 250-staff theatre production company and subsequently managed research projects on mental health and wellbeing across the UK and Global South. She has also founded an award-winning SME in London. This breadth of experience, spanning community building, organisational leadership, and research practice, informs her approach to cooperative development.
She is also a mentor for Laboratoria+, supporting the professional leadership of women across Latin America.
Danny Garside
(they/them)
Core team
Danny is a neuroscientist and meta-scientist, who splits their time between researching colour vision and trying to make academia more accessible, more efficient, and happier. They currently use their time being the community manager for the Digital Reserch Academy, starting a housing co-op (and helping others to do the same), and thinking about how co-ops might be a useful business structure for groups of people working in (and around) research.
Sara Villa
(she/her)
Core team
Sara is a researcher with more than 10 years of experience in experimental and computational resarch in healthcare (cancer and neuroscience genomics). She is a natural problem solver, and thrives working collaboratively and including different disciplines and actors into her and other’s research.
Sara’s collaborative nature has led her to work as a Community manager for different scientific communities, like The Turing Way (shere she is part of the Community Management Working Group), DSxHE and OLS. Her love for continuous improvement drives her training work, where she is working on bringing open science skills to diverse actors and projects.
Sara believes in empowering people to do what they do best, and has a special interest in introducing open leadership and training concepts to academia. Always putting people first.
Cassandra Gould van Praag
(she/her)
Co-Founder / Executive Director
Cass has a PhD in Neuroscience (2014) and 5 years experience building data science communities across a broad range of sectors at the Alan Turing Institute and University of Oxford, with a particular focus on embedding open research practices.
With both qualitative and quantitative research expertise, she is a skilled analyst, strategist and creative problem solver.
She aims for maximum transparency and reproducibility in her work, and prioritises inclusive and joyful participation.
She is a contributor to The Turing Way, an inaugural participant of the Wellcome Trust Success on the Board programme, and Co-Founder of Open Research Calendar.
Emma Karoune
(she/her)
Co-Founder
Emma is a Principal Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, leading the Research Community Management team.
She applies her open research and community-building expertise to a range of projects in health and biomedical sectors, and The Turing Way.
She also leads initiatives focused on professionalizing data science roles and advancing biomedical data science careers.
Emma has a PhD in Archaeobotany, a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and a FAIR Data Stewardship Training Fellow, dedicated to promoting accessible, inclusive, and open scholarship practices in research.
Malvika Sharan
(she/her)
Co-Founder
Malvika is an open source/science practitioner, educator and leader with a background in life sciences and bioinformatics.
Previously, she held research and leadership roles at The Alan Turing Institute and European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where she led and scaled data science and bioinformatics community initiatives, notably The Turing Way and EMBL’s Bio-IT.
Malvika co-founded Open Life Science (OLS), an international training, mentoring and capacity builiding organisation, before co-founding RCM Cooperative to mobilise and connect Research Community Managers from across organisations.
She has advised initiatives like NASA Open Science, the Society of RSE, Open Bioinformatics Foundation and Data Science Without Borders.
Malvika is a Mozilla Open Leaders Fellow, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2024) and INvolve Empower Top 100 Future Leaders (2025). A lifelong learner, Malvika is dedicated to improving open research, community building, collaboration, governance, and ethical practices in data science and AI.
Join our cooperative
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Join the leadership
Define our direction, for the benefit of all members.
Become a member
Position yourself for growth and development.
Support us
Contribute to collective growth
About Us
A cooperative of community managers dedicated to creating equitable, resilient and collaborative research.
Our Mission
Our mission is to empower research communities through capacity building, growing a network of community leaders and ecosystem facilitation.
Our Approach
We combine open research practices with a deep understanding of research community dynamics to deliver practical and impactful solutions.
Our Values
Inclusivity, collaboration, integrity, and sustainability are at the core of everything we do, guiding our interactions and initiatives.
Why a Cooperative?
Our cooperative structure reflects our core values of collaboration, equity, and shared purpose. Here's why it's fundamental to our work:
Shared Ownership
Every member has a voice and a stake in our collective success and direction.
Democratic Governance
Decisions are made collectively, ensuring transparency and accountability to our community.
Ethical Principles
Our model prioritizes people and planet over profit, aligning with sustainable development goals.
OUR AMAZING TEAM
Co-Founders
Cassandra Gould van Praag
(she/her)
Co-Founder / Executive Director
Emma Karoune
(she/her)
Co-Founder
Malvika Sharan
(she/her)
Co-Founder
Core Members
Alexandra Araujo Alvarez
(she/her)
Core Member
Danny Garside
(they/them)
Core Member
Sara Villa
(she/her)
Core Member
Contact Us
Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to learn more about our work or how we can support eachother!
In collaboration with ADR UK, RCM Cooperative facilitated the co-creation of a set of recommended operating principles (technical and socio-technical) for research communities working with administrative data.
We ensured the guidelines reflected the priorities of both ADR UK and the community leaders by developing a high degree of trust and alignment between all involved, using our deep expertise of working with academic communities and our inclusive collaboration approach.
Strategic objectives & methodology
We used a multi-modal engagement strategy to achieve four primary goals:
Network Seeding: Established a network of ADR UK community leaders from diverse sectors with four Nations representation.
Principles Development: Used an iterative prioritisation process to define generalisable operating principles for communities.
Capacity Building: Delivered foundational training in the skills, structures and staging required for effective research community management.
Equitable Collaboration: Provided experiential learning of equitable co-creation process, ensuring participants felt empowered as experts in the collaborative development of recommendations.
Recommendations for community success
Together we identified four essential pillars for the success of ADR UK’s research communities:
Collaborative Infrastructure: A critical requirement for robust digital and physical co-working spaces to ensure broad participation and opportunities for members to discover synergies.
Brand Visibility and Legitimisation: A desire for formal recognition by the funding body through visible branding and dedicated space on official platforms to enhance credibility with stakeholders.
Operational Efficiency: The adoption and communication of clear objectives, meeting agendas, and community charters to respect participant time and ensure high-value knowledge exchange.
Community-Led Missions: A strong preference for models where activities emerge organically from member interests rather than top-down prescriptions, aligning with academic freedom.
Outcomes
High Engagement: The programme attracted consistent participation throughout both the online and in‑person phases.
Knowledge Transfer: Participants reported that the activities meaningfully strengthened their understanding of how to build and support research communities.
Immediate Application: Many participants indicated they planned to put their learning into practice straight away, either in their day‑to‑day roles, in teaching, or within public‑facing research activities.
Empowerment: Participants felt their contributions were genuinely valued by ADR UK and that they were well supported to share their expertise.
Impact
Following the workshops, one participant was successfully awarded funds to set up the UK Data Linkage Community (UK DLC). The community lead and participant in our project, Mike Edwards had this to say about the impact of our work:
“Before this workshop, I was very unlikely to seek funding to establish a community. The course gave me the frameworks to clearly formulate my vision for the UK DLC, which was essential in presenting a successful proposal to funders, co-chairs and potential community members. Discussions with a diverse group of participants and the RCM Cooperative team helped me refine our goals and gave me the confidence to communicate my work across different audience levels. The ‘Empowered Groups’ participation framework really struck a chord, and has become the core narrative for our community development. It has also been really well received by the wider community and provides a lot of mutual benefits across the ecosystem.” (Mike Edwards, University of Swansea)
Further communities are soon to be launched, lead by the leaders we supported in this project! ❤️
What happened next
ADR UK have worked hard to develop their internal organisational policies to meet their communities need for ‘Brand Visibility and Legitimisation’. Some notable next steps planned by ADR UK include:
Recognition of communities with a formal ‘affiliate’ status;
A communities logo;
Listing on the ADR UK website;
Increased resourcing and strategic focus on supporting communities.
This work is a strong demonstration of ADR UK’s commitment to meet the needs voiced by their community leaders, building on the trust which is essential for successful community engagement.
RCM Cooperative’s specialised service model
RCM Cooperative provides the expertise necessary to scale these outcomes for your organisation:
RCM Training and skill-building: Programs of training, mentorship, and “Community Clinics”, to support community leaders in developing professional skill sets and navigation of community leadership issues as they arise.
Cohort development: Building connections and relationships between community leaders to strengthen their capacity for collaboration and collective action.
Collaboration Cafés: Facilitated online co-working to support complex co-creation into valuable community outputs.
Community data collection and communication: Community data management and interactive visualisations to monitor the impact of investment in your communities.
Define our direction, for the benefit of all members.
Step beyond traditional roles. Our cooperative invites you to lead from within, actively creating new opportunities and defining the strategic direction of our organization. Assume responsibility for initiatives that align with your unique interests, while significantly improving your capacity and shaping the landscape of our field.
In our cooperative, we don’t just find opportunities – we create them. Join a member-driven network focused on improving the capacity of every research community manager, ensuring you have the skills, support, and collective power to take charge of your professional journey.
Every partnership fuels our ability to empower research community managers and build a more resilient research ecosystem. Below are a few ways your organization can support our collective mission.
Allocate resources within your grant proposals for our membership or services. This directly invests in your team’s capacity for community management and supports our cooperative’s mission.
2. Discuss Your Community Strategy
Initiate a conversation with us about your organization’s specific needs for fostering effective and sustainable communities. We provide expert guidance and tailored solutions.
3. Share Our Story
Become an ambassador for our cooperative. By sharing our work with your networks, you help us connect with like-minded organizations and expand the reach of our capacity-building initiatives.
Alexandra Araujo alvarez
(she/her)
Core team
Alexandra is Senior Research Community Manager for BridgeAI at The Alan Turing Institute, where she supports UK organisations, particularly SMEs, to adopt and benefit from AI. She joined the Institute in 2023 as Research Project Manager for The Turing Way, where she supported the launch of the Practitioners Hub and contributed to the project professionalising infrastructure and research roles in data science.
Before moving into research, Alexandra led as CEO of a 250-staff theatre production company and subsequently managed research projects on mental health and wellbeing across the UK and Global South. She has also founded an award-winning SME in London. This breadth of experience, spanning community building, organisational leadership, and research practice, informs her approach to cooperative development.
She is also a mentor for Laboratoria+, supporting the professional leadership of women across Latin America.
Danny Garside
(they/them)
Core team
Danny is a neuroscientist and meta-scientist, who splits their time between researching colour vision and trying to make academia more accessible, more efficient, and happier. They currently use their time being the community manager for the Digital Reserch Academy, starting a housing co-op (and helping others to do the same), and thinking about how co-ops might be a useful business structure for groups of people working in (and around) research.
Sara Villa
(she/her)
Core team
Sara is a researcher with more than 10 years of experience in experimental and computational resarch in healthcare (cancer and neuroscience genomics). She is a natural problem solver, and thrives working collaboratively and including different disciplines and actors into her and other’s research.
Sara’s collaborative nature has led her to work as a Community manager for different scientific communities, like The Turing Way (shere she is part of the Community Management Working Group), DSxHE and OLS. Her love for continuous improvement drives her training work, where she is working on bringing open science skills to diverse actors and projects.
Sara believes in empowering people to do what they do best, and has a special interest in introducing open leadership and training concepts to academia. Always putting people first.
Cassandra Gould van Praag
(she/her)
Co-Founder / Executive Director
Cass has a PhD in Neuroscience (2014) and 5 years experience building data science communities across a broad range of sectors at the Alan Turing Institute and University of Oxford, with a particular focus on embedding open research practices.
With both qualitative and quantitative research expertise, she is a skilled analyst, strategist and creative problem solver.
She aims for maximum transparency and reproducibility in her work, and prioritises inclusive and joyful participation.
She is a contributor to The Turing Way, an inaugural participant of the Wellcome Trust Success on the Board programme, and Co-Founder of Open Research Calendar.
Emma Karoune
(she/her)
Co-Founder
Emma is a Principal Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, leading the Research Community Management team.
She applies her open research and community-building expertise to a range of projects in health and biomedical sectors, and The Turing Way.
She also leads initiatives focused on professionalizing data science roles and advancing biomedical data science careers.
Emma has a PhD in Archaeobotany, a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and a FAIR Data Stewardship Training Fellow, dedicated to promoting accessible, inclusive, and open scholarship practices in research.
Malvika Sharan
(she/her)
Co-Founder
Malvika is an open source/science practitioner, educator and leader with a background in life sciences and bioinformatics.
Previously, she held research and leadership roles at The Alan Turing Institute and European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where she led and scaled data science and bioinformatics community initiatives, notably The Turing Way and EMBL’s Bio-IT.
Malvika co-founded Open Life Science (OLS), an international training, mentoring and capacity builiding organisation, before co-founding RCM Cooperative to mobilise and connect Research Community Managers from across organisations.
She has advised initiatives like NASA Open Science, the Society of RSE, Open Bioinformatics Foundation and Data Science Without Borders.
Malvika is a Mozilla Open Leaders Fellow, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2024) and INvolve Empower Top 100 Future Leaders (2025). A lifelong learner, Malvika is dedicated to improving open research, community building, collaboration, governance, and ethical practices in data science and AI.
