ICOS would not be ICOS without the work and collaboration that takes place across member institutions and countries. Making sure that our community can be sustained for the long term is therefore an important task for the research infrastructure (RI).
Work package 3 of the ICOS-coordinated Horizon Europe project NUBICOS aims to consolidate the existing and future ICOS community through engagement activities and monitoring long-term societal impacts. By enhancing the transparency of ICOS work and societal impacts, NUBICOS aims to make ICOS RI sustainable for the long run.
A Community Engagement Portal for everyone in ICOS
Over the years, the ICOS community has grown into a strong network of scientists, researchers and technicians. Having a large and dispersed community can present its own set of challenges. “ICOS is a distributed research infrastructure, so that in itself presents some problems because people are all across Europe,” explains Evi-Carita Riikonen, Operations Officer at ICOS Head Office who is also the leader of work package 3 in NUBICOS. “They have very different institutional practices, different cultures, governments, funding bodies, and so on.”
NUBICOS aims to help bridge some of these differences by developing a new Community Engagement Portal. The Portal will pool together existing materials and develop new, relevant educational and informative materials and activities for the ICOS community. “The Portal will benefit the whole community,” says Evi. “Somebody new to ICOS will benefit because all the materials relevant to them will be in one place.”
“But the same applies to people who’ve been part of ICOS for a long time,” Evi continues. “Over the years, a lot of ICOS materials have been developed, so it can be easy to forget what community services already exist. So hopefully this can improve RI efficiency by preventing work from being duplicated.”
Currently, the Community Engagement Portal is in the early planning stages. “Right now, the idea is to map out what we already have in place. All the domains and National Networks already have their own training materials, workshops, and events which may benefit the whole ICOS community.”
After that, the Head Office will investigate what new materials and activities could benefit the community by working with the ICOS community. Evi sees this as a community engagement activity itself. “Absolutely! We plan to work with the Monitoring Station Assemblies (MSAs) and ask them if they think any materials or activities are missing.”
For Evi, the ultimate goals with the Portal are improved transparency and interaction. “Hopefully, through the Portal the community can see how different components within ICOS can relate to one another and will encourage the community to reach out to one another when, for example, planning activities.”
Challenges in monitoring long-term societal impacts of an environmental RI
The other major task of work package 3 concerns developing an ICOS RI Societal Impact process description. The societal impacts made by an environmental research infrastructure like ICOS take time to be felt.
Evi points out that “for ICOS the benefits will not materialise overnight.” It can take decades for any environmental impacts stemming from an action to be visible in society. “Traceability is another problem,” Evi explains. “It’s difficult to show objectively that ICOS data was the starting point of a particular decision, for example.”
Over time, focus can shift from one area to another. Monitoring longer-term impacts in spite of shifts is also another question to consider.
By developing an improved ICOS RI Societal Impact process description, ICOS will be able to better understand the long-term societal impacts of its operations. Being able to understand and therefore communicate the benefits of ICOS will help the wider community in scenarios such as when it comes to national funding agencies assessing ICOS work.
Each Research Infrastructure conducts their work differently, so there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to assessing societal impacts. But NUBICOS won’t be starting from scratch. “There was an EU project called RI-PATHS that developed the concept of impact pathways for RIs,” says Evi. “They provided some tools that you could follow, trying to identify the pathways relevant to your RI. This is something which we will use as a basis and develop further in the ICOS context”.
NUBICOS is strengthening the RI from within
Evi believes that, taken together, the Community Engagement Portal and the ICOS RI Societal Impact process description deliverables are designed to strengthen ICOS RI from within. “If we can see an improvement in the way the community interacts and supports each other then that increases the capacity of the community.”
“Being able to better demonstrate what is happening across ICOS and the societal benefits of this work can help member countries more clearly understand the worth of ICOS membership.”
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