The Outdoors and Health Network officially started on April 1st. The first couple of weeks have been spent setting up this web space and organising the kick-off meeting. The kick-off meeting is being held at Edinburgh Zoo next week. Network members are travelling from the length and breadth of the country to meet each other face-to-face for the first time. It will be nice to be able to put names to faces after so many months of planning this project.
The whole point of the project is to bring together researchers from different backgrounds who wouldn’t ‘traditionally’ be working together. It is more usual for researchers to stick to working with reaserchers from a similar background to themselves. We want to mix it up a bit and get geographers working with doctors, psychologists working with landscape architects and health care and biological sceintists working with environmental scientists. This is easier said than done as all these disciplines of research have different philosophies, methods and languages. So over the next year we are going to try as many ways as we can think of to bring together 19 researchers and a number of public agency advisers to help them work together effectively.
At the kick-off meeting as an ice-breaker we are going to start the day off with ‘Speed researcher dating’. This doesn’t mean we are creating a lonely hearts club for researchers; the session gives each network member 2 minutes to speak to each of the other partners to find out a bit about each other and where their research interests lie. Members will be given an OHN members’ directory to make notes in and to exchange contact details with each other. The objective is to break down the barriers right at the beginning so that people get to know each other which will make collaboration and knowledge exchange much easier at a later stage .
The rest of the meeting will be spent discussing the activities of the year ahead and getting organised for upcoming video conferences, researcher buddying, workshops and pilot projects. I have to say I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone and getting things off the ground.
I’ll report back how we get on at the Zoo next week.
Tags: Collaboration, interdisciplinary, Knowledge exchange, research interests, Researchers
