In our final post of the year, we look back on some of the stuff we've achieved together at Sciety in Q3/4 as we redefine the landscape of evaluated preprint discovery and curation.
Our community is at the heart of Sciety, informing everything we do, so we'll look at the changes we've made in the product and the people and processes that inform it.
Product
- We've shipped 250 changes to Sciety this year, 50 of which directly improve the experience for people
Amongst these changes are:
- Editing list details, to personalise and contextualise curation
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- Homepage and navigation improvements
homepage updates old and new
- Showcasing Groups alongside their evaluation activites
- Enabling eLife's Enhanced Preprint product, by providing Docmaps
- Introducing PRef tables to groups to increase transparency of group evaluation processes
- Adding more APIs to safely and quickly enable experimentation
- Showcased 'Refereed Preprints' to support a move to PRC.
- Improving the About page and releasing an FAQ
- Scaling our infrastructure to support lists with many articles and more evaluating communities
- 'Alpha' dashboards for groups to use to understand how people engage with their content.
- 'Alpha' dashboards that use AI to suggest what you might want to review next.
Process
Our process is open and visible on our team's Miro board
- We have introduced a process of 'Continuos Discovery', talking to researchers at least once a week to inform what we build next, based on the problems and concerns we uncover.
- We've engaged in Story Mapping parts of our product, which has helped us build the most valuable user facing functionality.
- Introduced POPCORN time
- Posting weeknotes to showcase our open, transparent approach to development
- Created two ensemble development streams (when our capacity allows) to help balance work between value delivery and performance and maintainence of our infrastructure.
- Used eLife's EDI framework as a lens on which to look at Sciety, ensuring we value Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at all aspects of our discovery and delivery.
People
"A kick ass non-profit, full of heroes" - Sciety user interview feedback 2022
The core team that develop Sciety has seen some changes that bring different perspectives and that have helped us work cross-functionally with eLife.
- Lina joined as Software Developer
- Mark joined as Product Manager
- Godwyns became Head of Communities at eLife
- Shane joined as Community Manager
- Anja joined as Marketing Executive
- Kevin re-joined as contract Software Developer
We've also worked closely with the team at Truematter this year, who have provided UX consultancy to help shape the journey for researchers who make use of Sciety in future.
Groups
In addition to changes in personnel, we've also welcomed two new evaluating groups to Sciety and have more on the way.
- Arcadia Science joined us in August, bringing a wealth of public commentary on public research products.
- ASAPbio/Scielo preprints crowd review joined us in October as the first reviewing group from Brazil, posting in Portuguese