Building off last year’s Beyond Impact Workshop; altmetrics11 & 12; and a storm of activity they have since catalyzed, PLOS hosted the 2012 ALM Workshop on November 1-3, 2012 in San Francisco. We convened various groups across the research ecosystem – researchers, institutions, publishers, funders, technology and service providers – for 3 days of collaborative breakout sessions amongst and between these groups. The workshop wrapped on the last day with the Altmetrics Hackathon.
Purpose and Aims
- Amplify awareness of social capital, mechanisms, and tools for using impact metrics that currently exist across target groups
- Discuss community-specific forms of measurable impact and examine convergence areas between audiences
- Cross-pollinate ideas between groups to better inform community-specific uses
- Coordinate plans for building best-practices, development of tools, and outreach/advocacy of altmetrics
We employed a blend of “unconference” and traditional programming. As a group, we generated a list of issue topics of interest to the participants. A smaller group, which coalesced during a clustering process, served as the basis for our first breakout session. The aim of this session was to articulate a concrete problem statement for each topic. The groups then generated an initial list of potential solutions in the second session. And from a subset of these solutions, the final session was aimed at designing an action plan.
Final Outputs
The full outputs of each session are archived here. The final technical documentation is found in the ALM Workshop 2012 Report.