Background: Cochrane has developed many new ways to get involved over the last five years, which go beyond authoring reviews. These include Cochrane Crowd, TaskExchange and translations. 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, Cochrane’s KT framework opens up lots of other new opportunities for people to participate.

We seek to have a community that is global and diverse, and so in this special session we will discuss the impact and limitations of these existing options and consider additional ways in which we can build a diverse Cochrane community.

Objectives: the objective of this session is to identify new ideas for how to build a diverse Cochrane community.

Description: the session will be divided into two parts with greater emphasis given to the future-focussed second part.

The first part will look back at what we have achieved in the last five years through brief presentations or case studies regarding Cochrane Crowd, TaskExchange and translations. This will then be followed by discussion.

The second part of the session will be future-focussed, 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.