Summary of summer school student feedback

Overall, the feedback of the BOR Summer School 2016 was excellent. Participants clearly expressed that the week had been intellectually stimulating; that all the sessions helped them to develop their understanding of a range of BOR topics; and that the week's delivery format enabled effective networking.

The quality of the facilities, the management of logistics, and the organization of all academic and social activities was specially highlighted by the participants. We also received some very useful suggestions for possible future topics and activities, as well as ways to increase opportunities for us to provide feedback about participants' ongoing work.

During the week, participants had the opportunity to engage in a group problem structuring activity designed to identify a set of strategic goals and candidate priorities for the BOR community within the next 1-3 years. The outputs of this group activity can be found in this pdf document. After an initial group 'icebreaker' that surfaced the perceived 'hopes' and 'fears' for the BOR community within the chosen timeframe, participants used the oval mapping technique to identify the following draft strategic goals and candidate priority areas for the BOR community:

STRATEGIC GOALS

• We aim to achieve a sustainable development of BOR as a community and academic discipline by aspiring to:
  • sustain a large BOR network of researchers and universities
  • increase the share of BOR publications in top journals while creating and disseminating BOR-specific knowledge widely, supported by the continuous production of BOR-specific academic outputs
  • enable and sustain long careers for BOR researchers, supported by a high visibility and recognition within academia and practice, and the conduct of high impact scientific research that is relevant to a large practitioner user base
• We also aim to achieve new insights into problems and problem solving processes with a view to develop better decision support that improves decision making and skills that have a positive impact on society, and make the world a better place.

CANDIDATE PRIORITY AREAS

• Create and strengthen a connected and attractive BOR community
• Strengthen visibility and recognition of BOR research/ researchers, by:
  • Connecting outside the BOR community
  • Becoming recognised as rigorous scientific discipline
  • Establish the practical value and scientific impact of BOR
• Develop and sustain a relevant interdisciplinary BOR community identity
• Provide opportunities for BOR-specific skills development
• Increase BOR knowledge stock and effectively educate potential BOR entrants
• Identify, generate & maintain sustainable funding for BOR research (at country and EU-level)

Moving forward, there was a general sentiment that the BOR Summer School was an event that participants would strongly recommend to others to take part in, with roughly half of the cohort wishing to participate again. It was also noted that the great majority of participants had not participated in any BOR conference streams before, with more than half of participants now planning to do so in the future. Finally, there was a strong consensus about the idea of forming a BOR European Working Group (EWG), and an even stronger consensus for this group to meet just before the regular EURO conferences, and include developmental and community-building activities.

Finally, there is a plan to run the next BOR Summer School at Loughborough University, Leicestershire, United Kingdom, in 2018.