Digital Worlds Steering Group
The Steering Group sets the direction of the Digital Worlds theme. Where the Horizon Scanning Group looks outward at what is coming, the Steering Group looks across the University itself, connecting work that is already under way and deciding how Manchester responds to it.
Digital Worlds runs across all three faculties and a wide spread of departments. Much of that work was not built to sit together and does not describe itself in the same language. The group exists so that someone is holding the whole picture, and so that the theme puts its effort where it will make a difference rather than where it is simply easiest to convene.
What the group does
Sets the theme's priorities
The group agrees what Digital Worlds will concentrate on, which of the research areas need building rather than simply describing, and what the theme says when it is asked to speak for Manchester on digital and virtual worlds.
Priorities are revisited rather than fixed. Work moves, funding landscapes shift, and a theme that cannot change its mind is not steering anything.
Connects work that is already happening
A good deal of the group's value is recognition. Members bring what they know is going on in their part of the University, and the group looks for the places where two efforts are close enough to be worth introducing to each other.
Decides how the theme responds to horizon scanning
The Horizon Scanning Group surfaces what is emerging. Not everything it surfaces warrants a response, and this is where that judgement is made: whether something becomes a sandpit, a briefing, a bid, a conversation with a partner, or nothing at all for now.
Commissions activity
Workshops, sandpits, spotlight sessions and calls for interest come out of the group, as does the decision to put the theme's limited convening effort behind one thing rather than another.
Represents the theme outward
Members carry the theme into their own faculties, centres and external relationships, and carry back what they hear. The theme has no separate machinery for this and does not need any.
How it works with horizon scanning
The two groups are deliberately different in what they look at, and each one shapes the other. The Horizon Scanning Group meets quarterly to look further ahead than day-to-day research allows, scanning industry, policy, international developments, academia, society, funding and risk. The Steering Group takes what that scanning surfaces, alongside what members bring from across the University, and decides what the theme actually does about it. That direction then shapes where we look next.
Briefings, the "Signatures of Emerging Digital Worlds" section of the newsletter, researcher spotlights and Bytes & Brews are how both groups reach people who sit on neither of them.
Who sits on it
Membership follows where the research actually is, rather than the shape of the organisation chart.
Theme lead
Chairs the group and is accountable for the theme within Digital Futures.
Faculty representation
Seats across Science and Engineering, Humanities, and Biology, Medicine and Health, so that no part of the University's digital work is invisible to the group.
Research area representation
People close enough to the research areas to say honestly what is strong, what is thin, and what is being claimed more loudly than it is being done.
Research staff and postgraduate researchers
Most of the people doing this work are early in their careers. The group is poorer for any version of itself that only hears from professors.
Professional services
Colleagues from research services, digital and library, who know what is possible to do rather than only what is desirable.
Bringing something to the group
You do not need to be a member, and you do not need a finished idea. Send a short note to the theme lead: a paragraph is enough. The useful things to say are what the opportunity or problem is, who else at Manchester it touches, and what you would want the theme to do that you cannot do alone.
We keep an eye on what colleagues across the University are publishing, and the research areas are drawn from that. It is an imperfect view and it will have left people out. If your work belongs in Digital Worlds and you cannot see it described, tell us and we will fix it.
Get in touch. Write to david.topping@manchester.ac.uk, or join the mailing list for the bimonthly newsletter, Bytes & Brews and calls for interest. We are especially keen to hear from research staff and postgraduate researchers.