Subject Line: Co-authorship doesn't have to mean what you think it means
The examples in this newsletter are drawn from real partnership experiences. Names and identifying details have been altered to protect privacy.
Who's This For
You're past the midpoint of your funded project. The work is happening. Reports are being written. And somewhere, maybe in the back of your mind or maybe in an explicit funder expectation, there's a question: what will last?
Not just what you'll accomplish while the funding flows, but what you'll have when it ends. What documentation, what evidence, what relationships, what shared intellectual products will exist that didn't exist before?
This newsletter is for anyone thinking about legacy before it's time to write the final report. For PIs who want to capture outcomes while they're happening rather than reconstructing them at the end. For partnership coordinators who understand that the best evidence for your next proposal is documentation from your current project — if you capture it now.
Here's what I've learned from watching projects end well versus end poorly: the difference isn't in the quality of the work. It's in the quality of the documentation. Projects that capture their legacy as they go finish strong. Projects that wait until the end spend their final months scrambling to reconstruct what they should have recorded along the way.