Collaboration Takes More Than Pizza — And Funders Are Paying the Price
3 July 2026 · 3 min read
By Cassandra Gould van Praag and Emma Karoune
In May 2026 we entered Astera Institute’s essay competition on the biggest bottlenecks in science. Our submission, Collaboration Takes More Than Pizza, sat in the largest category of entries: coordination failure.
Of all 195 essays submitted, coordination failure was raised ahead of data quality, training gaps, or AI-readiness. Astera’s own framing is precise: this shows that there isn’t a shortage of ideas, data, or funding. It’s the absence of any mechanism for doing collectively what no single lab can do alone.
Our essay argued that the missing element in this problem is human infrastructure - a well resourced role responsible for building collaboration such as a Research Community Manager (RCM).
The competition winners make our case
Five of the eight awarded essays highlighted issues which could be directly resolved by stronger Research Community Management support:
Matthew Leighton argues cross-institutional teams rarely form because science has no mechanism to nucleate collaboration around emerging problems. His essay proposes that roles are evaluated based on how they enable others’ work rather than their own.
Our interpretation: RCMs are professionally responsible for enabling other people’s work, spotting emerging alignment across disciplines and building the trust needed to nucleate a team. We also agree that how we evaluate the success of enablement needs refinement.
Christina Ernst shows that valuable functional genomics data is disappearing because of missing standards and coordination infrastructure for reuse.
Our interpretation: RCMs are intentionally placed to maintain the ongoing communication and documentation infrastructure necessary to build towards these essential standards.
Peter Koo argues that fields fail to converge on shared foundational datasets because no institution owns the convening step that forces a considered choice among competing priorities.
Our interpretation: Designing and facilitating this kind of structured, credit-aware convening is core RCM expertise.
Jaeeon Lee shows that competing theoretical frameworks in neuroscience persist unresolved because there’s no shared mechanism compelling researchers to test them against common data.
Our interpretation: An RCM here would build the cross-group trust needed to get competing labs into the same room and agree on a common evaluation, something no single lab may have the positioning to broker alone.
Niveditha Iyer highlights that valuable null and negative results routinely disappear from the record for lack of any infrastructure to capture them.
Our interpretation: An RCM could play an essential role in bringing the community together to collaborate on addressing this issue.
The problem isn’t willingness, it’s infrastructure
As the essay submissions show, the instinct to bring people together on these issues isn’t the missing piece. What’s missing is professional socio-technical infrastructure to collaborate well: shared norms, trust, accessible participation, governance structure, and a sustainable leadership pipeline for community activities.
Funders already support “building a community” as a line item, but that work often lands on someone with no formal training in communications or engagement, on top of a full research role, and with no strategic influence to secure proper resourcing. The activity appears resourced on paper, but can’t deliver the collaboration it was intended to produce.
The missing role has a name
A skilled Research Community Manager bridges disciplines, understands the research system, and brings professional expertise in facilitation, engagement, and equitable participation — skills rarely recognised in academic career paths, yet directly responsible for whether a community thrives or quietly stalls. Our hypothesis is that communities with a well-resourced, strategically empowered RCM will show measurably higher collaboration potential than communities without one.
What we’re building
RCM Cooperative exists to professionalise this role through the following activities:
- Delivering training grounded in the RCM Skills and Competency Framework, a model of the 65 skills that distinguish this work from general project management.
- Conducting research with funders and research-performing organisations to design and evaluate community infrastructure from the outset.
- Designing and developing tooling to help RCMs manage their community data and evidence successes or challenges, so the question “is this community working?” becomes answerable, not a guess at the final report stage.
Work with us
If your portfolio funds research communities, networks, or consortia, and you want to know whether the coordination they depend on is built to work, we’d like to talk. Read our essay on Zenodo, or get in touch with RCM Cooperative directly.
