Hosting the 2024 Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science Annual Conference in Nairobi

Patrick S Forscher

Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad

Problem Statement: The past two decades have given rise to a revolution in the credibility of the behavioral sciences (Vazire, 2018). This revolution is due in no small part to the development of open science communities. These communities, such as that sustained by the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), have built relationships, developed open resources, fostered their adoption by the broader scientific community, and sustained key aspects of open scientific infrastructure (Azevedo et al., 2022). Yet these communities are largely restricted to the Global North and also have limited coverage in the sectors where the behavioral sciences are applied, such as the non-profit sector (Steltenpohl et al., 2021). The proposed work will seek to expand the coverage of the SIPS community by supporting the hosting of its ninth annual conference, SIPS 2024, at the offices of the Nairobi-based behavioral science non-profit, Busara. By hosting the annual conference of an active and vibrant open science community in Nairobi at the headquarters of a well-networked behavioral science non-profit, we hope to build bridges between the open science community, the non-profit community, and the Kenyan behavioral science community, fostering exchange and kickstarting projects aimed at solving the problems that affect science stakeholders communities outside of academics in the Global North.

Proposed Activities: SIPS conference programming is typically very bottom-up in the sense that it is proposed by the attendees. SIPS 2024 is June 10-12, 2024. A SIPS event typically has at least three types of sessions: Workshops. These are pedagogically oriented sessions led by a presenter, which aim to teach the attendees a specific skill or piece of content. Workshops are designed to focus on teaching people how to solve a problem for which a solution is already well-worked-out. Examples of past workshops include ones on using Linear Mixed Effects Models, how to run international, “big-team” collaborative projects, network psychometrics, and multiverse analysis. Unconferences. These are sessions with a set discussion topic. The goal of these sessions is to discuss a specific problem and attempt to generate consensus on a reasonable direction for a solution. Examples of past unconferences include how to do effective science communication without oversimplifying the scientific consensus, how to improve diversity in the open science community, and how to develop effective pre-registration templates for qualitative research. Hack-a-thons. These are sessions focused around developing solutions to a well-defined problem. Hack-a-thon attendees attempt to do as much as they can to develop the solution as is possible within the timeframe of the conference. Often, the hack-a-thon project continues after the conference is done. Example hack-a-thons include one to develop a preprint server for psychology, one to develop policies to govern “big team” collaborative projects, and one to develop a psychology-specific data schema. In addition to these, SIPS conferences typically have an opening address by the SIPS president, a closing keynote by an invited researcher, a poster session, and one or more round-tables in which panelists discuss a focal topic. Since the COVID-19 Pandemic, SIPS conferences have incorporated a hybrid and/or virtual model to nearly all sessions offered. William, Patrick, and Nakubyana have already been meeting to decide the specific structure of the three-day conference, as well as investigate initial logistics. As the theme of SIPS 2024 is to build bridges between communities that do not often interact, SIPS 2024 will have at least three all-conference roundtables focused on topics that are important to the key communities that this conference brings together: current SIPS members (mostly from academic institutions in the Global North), nonprofit workers, and researchers in and around Nairobi. Through the remainder of 2024, the programming committee will finalize the structure of SIPS 2024, issuing speaker invitations and calls for proposals at the end of 2024. The programming committee will review proposals in early 2024 and issue a call for grants to support SIPS attendance. $6000 of the money will be used to support the attendance of scholars and scholars in training in Africa.

Openness: SIPS is an open scholarship community, and as such openness is built into its very fabric. SIPS conferences have given rise to numerous open science projects, including preregistration templates, the preprint server PsyArXiv, the “big team science” organization the Psychological Science Accelerator, and many more. SIPS projects are typically open by default and are hosted on the Open Science Framework or another open repository. In addition, SIPS 2024 is open in another respect, in that it attempts to engage a broader community than has been typical of its past meetings. It does this through hosting the event in Nairobi, the first of its meetings in Africa, and by partnering with a nonprofit, the Busara Center, to accomplish the meeting.

Challenges: SIPS, the organization, and its conference are principally supported by fees and dues. These fees and dues can be high enough to put attendance out of reach for prospective attendees at low-resource institutions. This is especially true given that Kenya is facing a cost-of-living crisis due to rising costs of maize, which has weakened the Kenya shilling relative to the US Dollar; one year ago, one USD was worth 118 KES, whereas it is worth 142 KES as of July 27, 2023. Busara, as a nonprofit, must also cover its costs to maintain sustainability. Overall, costs are the biggest challenge that face the current activities. Funding from the Open Infrastructure Fund would pay for the on-the-ground costs of the conference and allow reduced-rate or free attendance for African researchers, as well as free one-year SIPS memberships, greatly expanding the prospective attendance of this conference.

Neglectedness: The major alternate source of funding for meetings is the Code for Science & Society Event Fund. One of the proposers, Patrick Forscher, previously applied to the CS&S Fund to host an open-science-themed conference at Busara in 2022. That application was rejected due to a lack of credible partners. Now that Busara is partnered to organize the next SIPS conference, that weakness has been entirely eliminated from the current application.

Success: One of the main goals of the conference is to engage communities other than those that have typically attended past SIPS meetings. As such, two measures of success for the current conference are: The number of attendees of the meeting who are African The number of attendees who work at nonprofits In addition, this conference aims to “build bridges” by fostering collaborations across these communities. Thus, a third success metric is: After two years, the number of finished projects that started in SIPS that involve collaborations between current SIPS members and the above two communities

Total Budget: 20142.86

Affiliations: The proposal is affiliated with the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), a US-based non-profit scientific society. SIPS is devoted to understanding and improving behavioral science, especially psychology. Its annual conference is action-oriented, wherein attendees collectively identify problems in the conduct of science and take action to improve them. Among the many products to emerge from the annual conference are PsyArXiv, a preprint server for psychology that currently hosts 30,317 preprints, the Psychological Science Accelerator, a global network of 2,468 researchers across 73 countries dedicated to large, international, “big team science” projects, and Tenzing, an app to better credit contributions on academic papers. Busara is one of the oldest and most established behavioral science nonprofits in Africa, having completed 377 behavioral science projects and an extensive network of partners in Africa, especially Nairobi. Busara has also hosted conferences in the past, such the 2023 Disha Col’Lab Summit on Indian behavioral science, the 2016 Symposium on Economic Experiments in Developing Countries, and a side event for the 2023 Africa Evidence Summit. Busara’s Nairobi office has the capacity to host around 200 people, who will be convened in an event themed around bridge-building, the improvement of the behavioral sciences, and open science.

LMIE Carveout: Yes, this project qualifies for the LMIE carveout, as the project would fund a conference hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, and would be disbursed to the Busara Center, a nonprofit headquartered in Nairobi. Moreover, the funds would be used to make the conference more accessible to researchers at institutions in Nairobi without the resources to easily pay for conference fees and society membership.

Team Skills: The conference is organized by a programming committee (chair: William Krenzer of Duke University) and a logistics committee (chair: Patrick Forscher). Patrick is the Director of Meta-research at Busara. Patrick’s team’s remit is developing research and programs to identify prospective improvements in the behavioral science in the research process, especially in the Global South. Some of their past projects include a protocol for predicting whether behavioral science will generalize to East Africa and the co-organization of the 2023 Africa Evidence Summit. A member of SIPS since its second year, Patrick also has extensive ties to the SIPS community. William is a Research Quality Manager for the Office of Scientific Integrity at Duke University and is the Program Chair for the 2024 SIPS conference. William’s team at Duke ensures that Duke researchers are trained in responsible research conduct. William also facilitated the Senior Research Officer Meeting organized by the US Office of Research Integrity. William has been a member of SIPS for the last five years. Both Patrick and William are supported by Nakubyana Mungomba of the Nairobi-based nonprofit, IDinsight, as well as the SIPS Executive Committee. Nakubyana will provide a second bridge between SIPS and the Nairobi nonprofit world; the Executive Committee will provide strategic input and represent the interests of the current SIPS membership. The logistics committee is also supported by the Busara Operations Team.

Submission Number: 109