Skip to content

12/12/2025

Agenda

  1. Review of Actions
  2. Main Discussion:
    • Purpose, objectives and scope are defined in the Terms of Reference.
    • Overview of discussion from previous meeting
    • Confirm proposed work areas for group going forward
  3. Any other business

Minutes

Actions

Main discussion

Proposal for next steps:

  • Collect case studies from the community
  • Collect existing resources
  • Liaise with UKRI for guidance around funding
  • Learn/Collect best practice for measuring impact of EDIA initiatives.

Using all of this existing material and expertise to distill best practices/action plans that are tailored for the specific communities within this working group’s scope to improve EDIA in all areas.

Purpose, objectives and scope are defined in the Terms of Reference. In summary:

To promote and support a culture of EDI across the UK Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI), specifically communities engaging with CoSeC and CAKE activities, by delivering tangible, community-driven actions and offering strategic advice on inclusive practices in communication, recruitment, research, training, and event organisation.

  • Collecting, developing, and disseminating best practices for EDI
  • Representing diverse voices, with a focus on acknowledging and responding to their varying needs and contexts.
  • Identifying barriers to inclusion and developing actionable strategies to address them.
  • Recommending actions to stakeholders.
  • Liaise with other EDI groups and initiatives in the community.

Overview of discussion from previous meeting (full CAKEBox notes here:

  • Importance of ensuring that individuals from underrepresented groups, who face structural and policy barriers, should not bear the burden of driving change. Instead, responsibility should rest with those in positions of power and privilege, to create long-lasting progress.
  • We should take care to not reinvent the wheel.
  • Value in short sets of easily digestible guidance for our specific communities. Production of something practical that people can implement.
  • Case studies would be a good exercise to build and guide material.
  • Ensures best practices are meeting the problems and needs of the community and including a range of perspectives.
  • This requires reaching out to the full range of communities. We also need to be careful that the problems that we are proposing are the right ones by testing our assumptions.
  • This means reaching out to communities who are not engaging.
  • Apply practices on a small, local level and then use the momentum of the working group to push for changes on all levels.

Today's Discussion: confirm if the above proposal is the right starting point. If there anything missing that should be included at this stage?

  • We should organise into smaller working groups focused on a topic, each reporitng back to this regular meeting.
  • How can these best practices etc be turned into actionable points?
    • Make use of this group's extensive experience.
    • Identify short-, medium-, and long-term changes, i.e. starting points/essentials for "beginners" as well as advanced changes.
    • To keep momentum and use momentum to implement actions, we should define an action plan as soon as possible.
  • The group should have both an active and reactive role:
    • Central point of reference for people to ask for help.
    • Clear need for this due to frequent requests made to WHPC and others.
    • Hopefully we can have a clear, ready-to-action guide that we can point people towards.
  • Chair will send out a survey to capture preferences for working groups?
  • Decided topics: Case studies, success/impact assessment, collection of resources around specific issues (i.e. recruitment, communication, events).

Case studies: How do we make sure that people who do not usually engage with EDI are represented/reached?

  • In our first meeting we talked about positive examples which made a difference, this is where the case study idea came from. There is value in both positive and negative examples, but they may require different strategies to capture.

  • Also need to take care to collect enough detail to be useful, i.e. negative examples should also show next steps to prevent the situation happening again (where possible).

  • How?

    • Create a "sales pitch" to demonstrate value.
    • Active outreach to centres, community leaders and be explicit about targeting underrepresented groups.
    • Be open and transparent about the goals, including when and where this information will be shared as well as in how much detail.

Measuring impact: How can we embed this from the start?

  • This is not exclusive from the case studies, we could gather ideas from the community.
  • There is value in collecting both qualitative and quantitative data.
    • Case studies can be powerful to help us capture the full picture arounf the impact and cause.
      • Easily anonymised
  • Ethical approval and preregistration is important
  • Must only collect what you need.
  • We are dealing with (statistical) minorities -> sample sizes get small, so statistics get fuzzy

Any other busines?

Happy Holidays!

Date of Next Meeting (DONM): 09/01/2026, 10am, Online via Teams

(please contact cake-management@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk for any queries about these minutes)cd