Critical Making: Project Handbook

This Project Handbook describes the internal procedures of the Critical Making consortium in terms of management structures, communication and collaboration as well as quality control measures. It also defines the way Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) practices are integrated into our own project work, especially considering ethical issues related to personal data collection, analysis and storage. This will be elaborated in more detail in the Data Management Plan. Open source and open access are important elements of RRI and the strategy of the consortium in dealing with these aspects is also reflected in this document. The main target group for this deliverable is the consortium partners themselves as this handbook defines the project’s internal processes for securing high quality research work to be performed across a set of complementary partner institutions. It serves as a reference document for all Critical Making team members including individuals joining in the project at a later stage. Since the project is bringing together a set of diverse experts from different fields and backgrounds, a core principle guiding internal processes is open participation and flexibility. Transparency about the project status as well as risk recognition are additional principles that the project partners are committed to. Still, in order to effectively operate in a small, but distributed team, we have defined some procedures of how to best communicate and structure our collaboration. Regular meetings are held via videoconference as well as face-to-face. Communication is also taking place via a Signal group, e-mail and the project mailing list. The main tool for sharing and collaborating on documents is Nextcloud. The consortium is committed to producing high quality research outcomes and deliverables and thus quality control is important. Quality guidelines describe the internal peer review process, which is applied to all project deliverables. In order to continuously improve our internal processes, regular internal reflections are performed, normally in the context of project meetings. These reflections on the collaboration are intended for the whole group to serve as a self-reflection and self-evaluation tool about the project structures. In terms of ethics, the consortium is following the general rules defined by the EC and commits strongly to respect the individual and their privacy at all times. Templates have been prepared for informed consent as well as the exchange of primary research data amongst partners that may contain personal data from study participants. The document also considers personal data collection, processing and storage to be in line with the GDPR. Finally, openness is a core value of the project and thus the consortium is looking into open strategies with regards to the research outcomes. This relates to hardware that may be published under specific open licenses, following and where possible contributing to open standards, as well as the research publications, which should be made openly accessible as far as possible. This handbook is understood as a living document and is updated if the need arises in order to improve the internal processes