Notes on Meeting with QDR - BITS-Research/QDR-bot GitHub Wiki

Assistive Bot Idea

• An assistive bot that can regularly mine different repositories of awards to identify researchers that are funded to collect and share qualitative data.
• Using the APIs to check these awards databases regularly reduced the manual effort needed to recruit deposits.
• The NCEAS bot already does this very well for a well-bounded domain (arctic research) with clear requirements for data deposit / sharing. The challenge will be to modify this bot to do something more general for qualitative data
• The NCEAS bot automates a number of communications (called a "contact scheduler"), but we likely want to intervene and limit some of this email automation

The design questions for the bot then seem to be the following:

• Which awards databases should we (and can we) use to identify qualitative data for deposit
• How should the bot communicate with researchers and how should it provide messages or prompts to curators
• What other features would be useful to automate, and what requires a human-in-the-loop?

Funding agencies that we should particularly target

• NSF - which directorates? All? How do we search? Qualitative Data?
• NIH
• DOE
• DoD
• SSRC
• Others? NEH(?) RWJF Templeton Gates Russel Sage

Automation

• We should experiment with the idea that we can create automated messages that are then modified by the research team and personalized... But as we scale this may be difficult to manage (future problem)
• This feature of the NCEAS bot is described here: https://github.com/NCEAS/awards-bot/tree/master/inst/emails
• Here is an example of an automated message that initially contacts a funded researcher https://github.com/NCEAS/awards-bot/blob/master/inst/emails/contact_initial_social_sciences

Non-automation queue

• this would allow a curator to enter a set of parameters (award, contact info, etc) and have the bot then regularly remind curators about the schedule of events that may lead to deposit...

Opt in vs Opt out

• Researchers should be able to opt in or opt out of correspondence at any time
• If researcher doesn't respond to initial email the bot should stop sending updates after second attempt ...