At the beginning of October, we hosted our annual North American user meeting in the vibrant Mid-Western city of Chicago. For the first time since we started our North American user meetings 8 years ago, we decided to team up with our fellow Digital Science colleagues from Altmetric, Figshare and Dimensions to hold a joint conference.
The event was held at Catalyst Ranch, a unique venue that provided a relaxed and engaging atmosphere for our clients. At the start of the meeting our CEO, Jonathan Breeze and the founder of Figshare, Mark Hahnel gave a joint presentation on the challenges facing institutions today and how Digital Science works to alleviate them.
Real interesting talk at #dsuserday19 facilitated by @MarkHahnel about how to get researchers to support data sharing and library managed data repositories. #dsuserday19
— Megan N O’Donnell ?????? (@Mega_NO) October 2, 2019
Our very popular client stories session followed. We heard from a number of our clients how they use the different Digital Science tools to help inform and build their institutional research management strategy. Other sessions throughout the day provided our team with the opportunity to present updates on our development roadmap as well as insights into some exciting new features (ahead of our most recent release).
Sharing our success story with colleagues at Digital Science User Day. #dsuserday19 https://t.co/4xPpYymQCk
— Ellen M. Phillips (@ellphill) October 2, 2019
How to support annual reviews with @davidascherer, what a super user model for Elements looks like with Karen Gutzman, and what faculty think effective research assessment and visibility looks like with Ginny Pannabecker are some topics of user talks at #dsuserday19 pic.twitter.com/awHgXXOsGO
— Martha S (@newerwilderness) October 2, 2019
Day two of the user meeting brought on more client led presentations. These were lightening-style talks where clients briefly discussed a challenge they faced and how they used our tools as part of the solution. The last session of the meeting was an interactive workshop where clients offered feedback on our designs for Elements Version 6.
“It was a fantastic and very productive conference getting to work with our clients in person – both in helping them solve problems by making the most of our product, and in working together to perfect our upcoming features.”
– Burç Kibaroglu, Software Developer for Symplectic
We’d like to say a huge thank you to all attendees for travelling here and participating. Please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback, and we look forward to seeing you at another one of our events!