Background: Cochrane has developed many new ways to get involved, which go beyond authoring reviews. These include Cochrane Crowd, Cochrane Engage, translations, and consumer engagement. These initiatives are part of Cochrane’s Membership Project that seeks to broaden our community by giving a wider range of people the opportunity to be part of Cochrane. In addition, developments and changes within Cochrane might open up lots of other new opportunities for people to participate. We seek to have an inclusive and diverse community, and so in this workshop we will discuss the impact and limitations of these existing options and consider additional ways in which the community can be involved.
Objectives: The objective of this session is to learn about opportunities to get involved in Cochrane’s ecosystem and identify new ideas for improving the current offering.
Description: The session will be divided into two parts with greater emphasis given to the future-focused second part. The first part will look back at what we have achieved so far through brief presentations on topics, such as volunteer best practice or case studies regarding Cochrane Crowd, Cochrane Engage, translations, and consumer engagement. This will then be followed by discussion. The second part of the session will be future focused, asking participants how they think Cochrane can build on this work to further develop our diverse and global community through new ideas or through addressing the limitations of the existing options. This will take the form of small group discussions. The session will close with an open discussion about priorities for the future. Relevance and importance to patients: Patients are benefiting from these initiatives, for example, by gaining access to plain language summaries translated into their languages and improved evidence production. Patients are able to share their lived experience as healthcare consumers within Cochrane to improve evidence.