25 April 2025 | Amy Hodgkinson, Learning and Development Lead at PEDRI and Anna Woolman, Community Engagement and Knowledge Sharing Lead at PEDRI
Ester, our PEDRI Good Practice Standards Lead, compared co-creating a set of Standards for public engagement to a dinner party where everyone brings a dish and you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Organising our first webinar about the Standards earlier this month felt similar: Would people want to come to the dinner party? And if they did, would they want to eat at the table?
It turns out the answer to both of those questions was yes.
Over 270 people, from across the data science community, tuned into the webinar. When polled, most also said they were interested in using the Standards in their work. There were so many audience questions that we couldn’t get to them all in the session. We’ll be sharing responses to some of these questions over on our LinkedIn.
No doubt the success of this webinar was thanks to our fantastic speakers Jan, Shayda and Piotr. They respectively represented the public, engagement practitioner and researcher voice and shared valuable insights into how the Standards can help bring the public along on your data research journey. You can see some of their main takeaways dotted throughout this blog.
Creating a bank of resources
When starting out in public engagement, the sheer volume of information, ‘how-tos’ and guidance can be overwhelming. Our resources hub is there to help you navigate this mountain of guidance and provides practical tools that can support you to develop your own good practice in public engagement in data research.
We created this bank of resources because our community of data researchers, managers, public engagement practitioners and public members highlighted a need for a centralised hub that collates existing resources specific to data research.
In 2024, during PEDRI’s rebrand, we reached out to the community to understand what resources you are all currently using and what you still feel is missing. You were generous enough to share lots of useful resources with us, which all helped to build the foundations of the hub.
But this was just the beginning of the conversation. With new resources being created and shared, we are continuously adding to the hub each month, which has already doubled in size since our launch last November.
Beyond just collating information, we also want to build a community space that encourages learning and development towards our Good Practice Standards. To support you in working towards these Standards, we will be sharing tools and guidance throughout the year to help you get started.
Getting started
With our PEDRI’s Standards in mind, which emphasise the importance of two-way communication, we want to go beyond us telling you how to do good public engagement. We want to foster collaboration so we can learn from each other, reduce duplication and improve all our practices.
Alongside our resource recommendations, we will be asking you to share your real-world experiences implementing the tools in practice, your own resources and tell us what new resources you would like to see to help you build a culture of public engagement in your own data research work.
After each of our webinars, which will touch on aspects of all seven of our Good Practice Standards, we’ll share relevant resources from our hub. As our most recent webinar introduced the Standards, our Learning and Development Working Group have selected the following tools to help you dive further into them:
- Public Consultation on the PEDRI Good Practice Standards | A report from PEDRI outlining the insights from a public consultation on the draft Good Practice Standards for public engagement data research (named Best Practice Standards at time of publication).
- Connecting Society: How everyday data can shape our lives | Shayda Kashef from ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK), along with co-host Mark Green from the University of Liverpool, explores how administrative data can be used to inform better policies and support communities through their podcast series.
- Examples of Public Engagement Activities | Are you wanting to explore what public engagement can look like in data research? Understanding Patient Data provide examples of effective public engagement in health data that have worked well.
Help us make the resources hub better
- Have you used a resource from the hub? Take our 2 minute survey and let us know about it.
- Share your own resources using our upload form.
- Is there a resource you want to create or something you were hoping to find, but didn’t? Get in touch with us at contact@pedri.org.uk
