Stakeholders

• 1: Community members
• 2: Funders
• 3: Researchers

1 - Community members

Community members have an important role to play in both the development of the overarching ready4 model and the applicability of ready4 to specific decision problems.

One of the main contributions that community members can make is to provide advice. To date, the advice we have elicited from community members has related to shaping the design and conduct of individual modelling projects. In the medium term, he hope to supplement these opportunities through growing a ready4 support community.

2 - Funders

There are six main types of funder that can provide cash and/or in kind support to ready4:

1. Grant making research bodies can support modelling project proposals submitted to their existing funding schemes. These types of funder could also consider making a number of changes to how they work including the assessment weightings and levels of financial support given to the reproducibility, replicability and transferability components of research proposals and initiating targeted calls for proposals to improve the transparency, reuse and maintenance of models to inform policy.

2. Government departments can support the development of ready4 as part of programs to enhance data analysis and modelling capability in youth mental health by providing support to develop core ready4 infrastructure (e.g. our software maintenance and community development priorities). When commissioning new modelling projects, governments could make providing open access to code and (to the greatest extent feasible, balancing confidentiality considerations) data a requirement of all applicants.

3. Youth mental health service commissioners can commission data analysis and modelling projects that develop novel decision aids and to apply existing ready4 modules to undertake new analyses.

4. Philanthropic donors can help accelerate our development and enhance our impact by supporting us to bring our existing in-development software to launch and to further extend the ready4 model.

5. Corporate sponsors can provide cash, expertise and free product licenses to support both our core open-source infrastructure and individual modelling projects.

3 - Researchers

Researchers in multiple discipline enhance prior, current or planned future projects related to how environmental, social and technical systems shape health-economic outcomes by using ready4 to:

• label and share non-confidential data (e.g. tables of summary statistics / parameter values) from prior and current work to extend access and impact;
• working with modellers to undertake modelling analyses;
• working with coders to redevelop study analysis scripts by authoring modules that are transferable to other contexts;
• supervising student projects to assist with ready4’s current priorities; and/or
• develop research proposals that incorporate a modelling project.

Researchers considering using ready4 should ensure they understand the development status of the tools they wish to use. If the required software is not yet a production release (a process we are working on!) we’d suggest only using it for testing or exploratory work that is not designed to inform decision making. All our software is free and open source so you don’t need to ask our permission to use it. We are however, very happy to discuss ideas for potential collaborations - contact the project lead to arrage a chat.

We also welcome advice from researchers about how we can make ready4 more relevant and useful.