WHY organize a barcamp for Doctoral Colleges at University of Innsbruck?

We all know the “let’s meet soon for coffee” that never happens.
We’re all in Innsbruck, part of a large research community, yet we rarely meet beyond our departments, research bubbles, and comfort zones - your next co-author might be one floor above you and you’d never know. An Unconference can change that by bringing the community that already surrounds you into the same room and turning proximity into connection through open exchange.

The Barcamp offers a low-barrier, high-energy way to foster networking and serendipitous exchange across disciplines and faculties in Innsbruck, complementing traditional, discipline-specific conference venues and picking up threads that might otherwise be lost, such as after a DK-X-Change week or an EPoS summit.

The UIBK Barcamp invites participants to jointly make sense of topical opportunities and challenges, creating new connections and collaborations, and providing a supportive space - especially for early-career researchers - to surface dilemmas, share lessons learned, and gather practical advice. The range of topics might include: research topics, methodological reflections, career challenges, third mission strategies, doctoral college governance, university politics, open science practices, third-party funding, and many more.

HOW - the Format of the Doctoral College Barcamp

The Bar Camp will be organized as follows: After a general welcome and introduction to the workshop, the facilitators will explain the Bar Camp format to the participants. Next, participants can propose session topics to the group. When proposing a session, participants can indicate whether they would be willing to host the session as well or not. The facilitators note down the proposed sessions on a poster.

Once all proposals have been made the participants decide on which sessions will take place through “dotmocracy”. Participants are each given as many dot stickers as there are subsequent rounds of sessions (usually 2-3). They place dots next to the session that they like. Based on the final distribution of stickers, the facilitators arrange the proposed sessions across three sessions of 45 minutes each.

The most prominent sessions (with the most dots) are distributed across the session rounds to avoid as much overlap as possible. For the rest of the unconference, the participants are free to choose the sessions they would like to attend in each of the session rounds.