Probably also interesting for this thread… and for the forum discussion later this afternoon (STS/anthropology/sociology v.s. DIY practitioners)
There is a framework called “Community owned and managed research” (COMR) that I heard about through PublicLab. I don’t know much about it (maybe someone here does?). It comes from the environmental justice world and was developed by community organisations. It is a set of requirements for community-based participatory research (CBPR) collaborations:
- requires funding equity (50/50 share)
- management parity of the grant
- co-author/co-credit on everything
- science that is done for compliance (not a peer reviewed paper) and data used for attainment and compliance.
It’s hard to google (and I can’t access scihub here!!! wtf - I think this is the original paper: The West End Revitalization Association’s Community-Owned and -Managed Research Model: Development, Implementation, and Action — Maryland Population Research Center), but I found this paper on some research that used the COMR framework:
Use of community-owned and -managed research to assess the vulnerability of water and sewer services in marginalized and underserved environmental justice communities - PubMed
A novel community-driven research approach that builds on the principles of CBPR stresses community ownership and management at each stage of the research process, promoting community-based organisations (CBOs) with demonstrated organizational capacity to the role of principal investigator and project manager (Heaney et al., 2007; Wilson, Bumpass et al., 2008). Principles of community-owned and –managed research (COMR), described previously (Heaney et al., 2007; Wilson, Bumpass et al., 2008), go beyond traditional CBPR and other forms of university-managed research with communities by emphasizing the credibility and capacity of CBOs to maintain ownership and community trust. COMR was developed by the West End Revitalization Association (WERA) through its organizing efforts to preserve three low-income African-American communities in Mebane, North Carolina, a semiurban town of 7,284 people (78% white, 18% black per the 2000 U.S. Census). WERA represents the communities of West End, White Level, and Buckhorn/Perry Hill, comprised of approximately 500 households, 10 churches, and one Masonic Lodge.
WERA worked with residents to stop plans to build a 27-mile interstate highway corridor from I-85/40 in Mebane to Danville, Virginia, whose path would have leveled historic homes and churches in the West End and White Level communities (U.S. Census Bureau [USCB], 2011). The three WERA communities are 85% to 95% African-American, and many residents, descendants of slaves, inherited land passed down across multiple generations (Wilson, Cooper et al., 2008).
WERA formed a COMR partnership with researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health (UNC) to perform a cross-sectional household drinking water and sewer service survey and measure fecal pollution levels in drinking water and surface water supplies in the communities, which is reported in this article.