Sharing your coding schemas: Developing a Platform to fit within the Qualitative Research Workflow

Qualitative coding schemas are an essential part of qualitative research used in methods like Grounded Theory. To date, there is no platform to share these coding schemas. Sharing and exchanging these coding schemas has a great potential when it comes to the traceability of qualitative research and well as the re-use of coding schemas. Based on an interview study with qualitative researchers, we propose concepts for integrating a new platform for sharing qualitative coding schemas. Based on theoretical work by Birnholtz and Bietz (2002), it became clear that an easy-to-use system can foster the acceptance and the willingness of researchers to share their coding schemas. We identified three major points to focus for this on: the governance of the platform, the development of the ontology itself and integrating the sharing of qualitative coding schemas into the workflow of researchers by enabling direct upload from the qualitative coding software.