I found the Local Network Lead Retreat 2025 to be very inspiring and came back to Oxford feeling charged up. Alongside the nice lunches served in the LSE staff canteen, a highlight for me was that I was invited to run a “Sandpit on funding applications” on Day 2 of the retreat. This was my second time running a Sandpit on open research themes with Local Network Leads — and my third overall, since I used the same method in a workshop at the Open Science Retreat 2025.
We had a lively discussion of some exciting research ideas — spanning fundamental research topics including meta-reviews, causality, and concept validity. I’m particularly pleased that the workshop method itself is becoming fully replicable. I would invite others to try it for themselves with their colleagues. To that end, I’ll describe how the workshop works, in outline. (Similar information is reprised in the slides available here.)
5 minutes | Introduction: explaining how the session will work.
40 minutes | Part I: Sharing and developing project ideas. Participants are invited to find ways to either work in small groups or individually. In the retreat, there were three participants — and some observers — and the participants decided to work individually on ideas that they had already been developing before the workshop. At OSR2025, people instead worked in small groups on emerging topics.
5 minutes | Comfort break: also useful to give people a little time to prepare for the next step.
10-20 minutes | Pitching and vote. We allow 5 minutes to pitch each of the ideas. We “simulate” grant funding by awarding time for further discussion of the two top-voted ideas in the second round.
40 minutes | Part II: Writers’ Workshop. Here we share feedback on the two top-voted ideas. The method used emerged in creative writing, and has also been taken up by enthusiasts of design pattern languages. We focus on (+) things we like about the proposal and then on (Δ) things that could improve about the proposal, followed by (?) any clarification questions from the person who proposed the idea.
We also had 10 minutes for feedback on the workshop itself at the end: one suggestion would be to try running the same workshop in a more tightly-knit disciplinary community, or with a funder. I’d be interested to know if anyone tries that out, or, indeed, tries the workshop format in any other setting.
LNL Joe Corneli, Oxford Brookes University