Conference Program

Far from being regarded as the result of pure individual intellectual production, scientific knowledge and practices are now widely considered by scholars as arising from interactions among heterogeneous social actors and institutional contexts, especially when dealing with issues that are societally relevant and intersecting different understandings by scientific disciplines and social sectors (Gibbons et al., 1994; Jasanoff, 2004, Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993). In this perspective, Research infrastructures (RIs) can be regarded as socio-technical systems, with the social components – namely the engaged community of developers, users and stakeholders – playing a critical role in sustaining effectiveness and long-term sustainability.

This contribution presents a training experimentation conducted within FOSSR RI, a NextGenerationEU project aimed at fostering open science in social science research, which was proposed to the developing community of the infrastructure’s contributors, users and stakeholders. The programme aimed to complement traditional training methods by offering sessions designed to stimulate transformative learning, empowerment, and community building among researchers, technologists, and stakeholders (Spinello & Fabrizio, 2025).

The underlying premise was that incorporating transformative methodologies into the development of a research infrastructure could promote critical learning, collaborative empowerment and distributed leadership, particularly relevant in complex knowledge ecosystems where infrastructures function not only as technical platforms but also as spaces for interaction, shared problem framing and collective learning.

Within this framework, the Action Research Sessions played a central role in cultivating learning-to-learn dynamics. These sessions were developed at CNR-IRCrES as part of a research initiative to rethink the new competencies essential for social science researchers (Rizziato, 2020, 2022a, 2022b). These sessions adopted a transformative methodological approach based on systemic thinking and horizontal leadership, focusing on transformative learning for processes and competencies. This was achieved through the integration of cognitive, emotional, and volitional dimensions to develop both subjective and intersubjective awareness, encouraging participants to take an active role. They worked according to a "horizontal leadership" approach – more accurately defined as systemic and evolutionary development leadership – capable of synergistic learning within the project thanks to forms of collective refocusing on the desired impact.

The work sessions aimed to provide learners with theoretical perspectives and practical exercises to shift the focus of research towards identifying the actual beneficiaries of actions, and to reconsider the entire project from a systemic perspective. Through a combination of reflexive enquiry, co-design and experiential learning, participants were encouraged to formulate and reformulate specific “development questions” – conceived as systemic questions – to explore the feasibility of innovative ideas, and to experiment with processes in which personal, organisational and collective learning occurred simultaneously, creating value for all stakeholders.

The FOSSR experience with Action research sessions shows how learning to learn can be interpreted as a collective competence emerging within research communities engaged in collaborative knowledge production. Participatory training environments such as these create the conditions for reflexivity, shared and transformative learning aimed at community building, contributing to the development of inclusive and socially robust research communities capable of critical thinking and the co-creation of public value within Research Infrastructures.