The more astute among my readers will have noticed for a few days that there is a new page on the site. Vitae Innovate is the page which will contain information about my project for that scheme. The more impulsive of you might have taken a look at the page by now to see what all the fuss is about, but if you haven’t, here are the details!

Vitae Innovate is an annual programme which attracts bids to fund innovative projects that are designed to improve the skills of researchers in the UK. Over the last two years Innovate has attracted hundreds of proposals of all shapes and sizes, and this year there were 92 submissions. Of those 92, eight were awarded funding and my project was one of the eight chosen! It was a great surprise when I found out that I had been picked from so many other projects.

My project, currently titled Non-Zero-Sum, is all about collaboration, and thinking about how to engage researchers in the themes of collaboration. My mechanism for this will be an original game, which I am developing, which will allow players to get an initial engagement with the themes; this can then be followed up with discussion, and I will be providing supporting resources to enable that.

As the theme of the project is collaboration it seemed like a really good idea to release the final outputs of the project under a Creative Commons license, and the game and supporting resources will be released into the wild under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. There is very often an understanding between trainers and skills developers of borrowing and adapting things that you’ve seen and you like; in this instance I wanted to positively encourage it, I want people to modify whatever I come up with, tweak it, add to it, send it off in different directions, use it with different audiences than I had envisaged and to different ends.

Over the coming months I’ll be blogging about my progress and the things that I’m doing to develop the game and resources. I’ll be trialling the resources with institutions around the UK in early 2011, and if you’d like me to come and work with your PGRs or post-docs then please get in touch and we’ll try to get it arranged.

Coming soon: posts about recent workshops, articles that I’ve written and my time at the Vitae Conference 2010 (where I was asked to present a poster on Non-Zero-Sum)!