This project aims to crowdsource information about women of note connected with the University. The project compliments the ‘Inspiring Women’ initiative launched by the University for International Women’s Day in 2014. It will also be able to draw on the work around women in medicine from Innovative Learning Week in 2015, and the upcoming Ada Lovelace day events in October 2015 focussing on women in computer science connected with the University. More generally it fits well with a variety of initiatives designed to highlight positive female role models within the University.

The project would be led by a PhD intern, who would design the crowdsourcing process, alongside running a targeted publicity campaign. They would also design and run a more intensive programme of activities during Innovative Learning Week 2016, designed to promote content creation.

For each woman of note an image, a short paragraph of informative text, a set of geolocation coordinates to a relevant location, and links to further resources would be produced. All information produced or gathered would be licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons license. The process of creating this content will promote the development of a variety of valuable digital skills. Participants do not have to be physically on campus and so it could be a positive way of promoting engagement and belonging within our ODL student community.

The emphasis in this project is on the creation of new content, however it is important to showcase the output. We will investigate the potential to integrate the content with the Google Field Trip application, allowing users to find content based on their current location, alongside more conventional outputs such as plotting on a Google map layer. However, the data set of content produced will be available as an OER for a range of other uses including in virtual campus tours, websites and other apps.