ResBazAZ_mission_statement.Rmd

#Research Bazaar Arizona Mission Statement
The Research Bazaar is a worldwide festival promoting the digital literacy emerging at the center of modern research. The local chapter that has been established by University of Arizona students, researchers, and staff is known as Research Bazaar Arizona, shortened to ResBazAZ or ResB[AZ]2 as featured on our logo.

This mission manifests as three core focus areas: 

1. Campaign
2. Community
3. Conference

##Campaign 
ResBaz Arizona teaches research tools through peer-to-peer interactions driven by a community of researchers. Students and researchers are uniquely aware of what it takes to survive in the research world, and it is this shared experience that allows peers to understand, train, and support each other. Additionally, there is an overwhelming need to train researchers in new and emerging interdisciplinary domains such as bioinformatics and data science. Traditional departmental classes and organizations are by nature slow to generate course materials and degree programs to meet this need. ResBaz Arizona activities dovetail perfectly with other international computational teaching organizations like Data & Software Carpentry to produce synergistic communities that cut across traditional departmental divisions. ResBaz Arizona is community-organized and thus scales to the demand for training. . But ResBaz Arizona cannot do anything alone! This leads to the second area of focus.

##Community 
Training researchers to use tools and then releasing them into the wild is not enough; re/training the next generation of digitally-literate researchers requires constant engagement to improve their skills, reinforce techniques that have been learned, and to push further into that knowledgebase. We host weekly and annual events to continually engage researchers once they have started to leverage their new computing knowledge for their domain research. We also point out to other organizations that are doing great computational, domain-agnostic, and/or interdisciplinary things on campus, e.g. iSpace, Software Carpentry, the BIO5 Institute, and the UA Graduate Center. There are so many people distributed across the University of Arizona working to make research faster, smarter, more reproducible, more diverse, and have broader impact that it can be difficult for any one person to find them all. Enter ResBazAZ: we are domain- and department-agnostic and so can act as a central hub to point people in need to other resources at the University of Arizona and beyond.  

##Conference 
During the month of February and March the annual Research Bazaar events will be held at a number of university campuses around the globe. The aim of these events is to equip researchers from all career stages with the digital skills and tools required to do their research better, faster, and smarter. A unique blend of academic and social life, ResBaz is an event unlike most academic conferences you have attended. The focus is on short talks that demonstrate a researcher’s needs, knowledge, interests, or tools that are available to address research questions. All disciplines will be represented from linguistics, the humanities, engineering, life sciences, and astronomy. Then breakout, hands-on session will be hosted in groups. This is then followed by longer workshops that will be available on the second day of the annual Bazaar. Additionally, there will be social and networking events for attendees to meet other researchers across the campus. This is designed to help break down the natural departmental and domain divisions that exists on all university campuses. Ultimately, the goal is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, interaction, and to strengthen the University of Arizona research community as a whole.