CLARIN-PLUS Workshop on User Involvement by FIN-CLARIN
A blogpost by Tero Aalto (FIN-CLARIN)
The fourth type I CLARIN-PLUS workshop for new countries and consortia was organized by FIN-CLARIN in Helsinki 8-9 June. The topic of the workshop was user involvement, and it was aimed at the people responsible for user involvement activities in the national consortia. A total of 23 participants from all over Europe came together to discuss new ideas and best practices to engage existing users of CLARIN services, and to discover and to attract new ones.
Some CLARIN countries already have experience with systematically engaging user communities. For example, both FIN-CLARIN and SWE-CLARIN visited a number of research organizations in their countries in 2016. The CLARIN User Involvement group coordinates activities and helps national consortia in their UI efforts. CLARIN is reaching out beyond the field of language research, towards digital humanities and social sciences.
The core of user involvement is getting and staying in touch with both the existing and potential user communities, simultaneously disseminating information and receiving feedback. CLARIN's "business model" should be to work together with researchers. Services can be developed both top-down and bottom-up. In addition to direct communication, social media also plays an important role and should be put to active use. Different communities have very different needs that can sometimes even contradict each other. This is why it is important for CLARIN to offer a broad spectrum of resources and services.
The workshop program and materials are available on the workshop page.
More tweets about this CLARIN-PLUS Workshop on User Involvement and other CLARIN User Involvement activities: #clarinui Tweets