Cohort Planning

Overview

Since 2018 we have iterated on a strategy that works well for planning and coordinating with partners, and engaging and attracting research teams to participate in the Champions Cohort.

Planning with partners can take several months, depending on the needs of their community and how well they already know about the opportunities in the Openscapes Champions Program.

Engaging with new partners

When we are engaging with a new community, these are the things that we share in our first planning meetings. Our goals are to introduce our process, discuss with partners, and get feedback on our engagement strategy. When we are planning a Champions Cohort, we also share proposed date-times.

We’re getting to know new people. And they’re getting to know us. We bring our warmth and competence to these meetings with the goal of building mutual understanding, care, and trust. We need people to trust us with their time. We can start focusing on “transitive trust” - building real relationships that are nurtured from existing communities and collaborations.

Engaging with existing partners

When we are planning a Champions Cohort with an existing partner, we share some of what we have accomplished together.

Example: NOAA Fisheries

Openscapes has led 13 Champions Cohorts with NOAA Fisheries (NMFS, the National Marine Fisheries Service) since 2020, including 3 concurrent Cohorts in Fall 2024. We’re leading 3 more Cohorts in Fall 2025. Planning each Cohort has involved proposals to center supervisors, presentations to center leadership, coordination with center staff, and presentations to recruit participants and “ask me anything” sessions to answer questions, building from Openscapes’ publications, slides, etc and operations overview.

We have a dedicated NMFS Openscapes website with a section for Champions Cohorts planning resources that can be reused/remixed.

Cohort planning document

We make a copy of our OpenscapesCohortPlanningDoc [ template ] and Champions Engagement Spreadsheet to share with our Partners. This planning document is to help us finalize dates and text language for announcing and coordinating our Openscapes Cohort. We use it to take notes from meetings and to draft various communications. We continually update and add to the Cohort Planning doc as dates are set and communications are drafted. This is an implicit introduction to how we work, with our open processess so that all of this work is open to the planning teams.

The later section on Champions Cohort tech setup describes and links to the CohortPlanning GitHub Project through which we manage checklists in Issues focused on engagement and tech setup after dates are set.

Partners Planning Kickoff Meeting

The Partner Planning Call kicks off the collaboration. In this meeting we introduce our process, discuss with partners, partners share more about their research community, we get feedback on our engagement strategy, and share proposed date-times for the Cohort.

With a new partner community, the goal of the kickoff meeting is to build trust by giving them confidence in our approach (based on evidence!); we save introducing cohort structure, Pre-Cohort Engagement, and onboarding any assistants for a later meeting.

Example Kickoff Meeting Agenda

Goal: Introduce our Openscapes process, discuss with you, and get feedback from you on our proposed dates and engagement strategy for the Cohort.

  • Quick intros - welcome Stef (5 min)

  • Openscapes Champions process - focus on participants (5 min)

    • We have a process we’ve used with 29 Cohorts with ~10 different science groups with different research domains. Our process is all open and accessible to you — and we are intentional not to overload. We will onboard you as we go, sequencing what we are focused on.

    • We know to be successful we need to gain a depth of understanding of who you imagine being the participants in this Champions Cohort. 

    • Right now, we need to focus on audience. Not for lesson design, but for our participant engagement strategy. We approach engagement from a mindset that participants want to learn, don’t fear change, but are very limited on time. The antidote to this challenge is trust.

      • We need people to trust us with their time. We can start focusing on “transitive trust” - building real relationships that are nurtured from existing communities and collaborations.

  • 1) Reviewing audience and approach (screenshare CohortEngagement spreadsheet [ dev below and link])

    • What makes these people a group? What binds them together? 

    • Do Science Hub researchers meet periodically/regularly? 

    • What are some collaborations within the group that already exist?

    • What else would we need to know before we emailed these participants? 

    • Do you have a sense of what tools and approaches and processes they say they need? 

  • 2) Setting Champions Cohort date-times

  • We’ve found it’s best to engage with folks when there are dates they can commit “yes” to, and they can share (no polling participants for dates). This includes asking partners for any big conflicts like conferences that this community attends. Setting date-times in advance streamlines scheduling and it makes this event seem more “official”.

    • We propose the ESA Openscapes Champions Cohort will run from April - June 2026. We will meet as a Cohort via Zoom five times over two months for 1.5 hours, on alternating Wednesdays or Thursdays. Would these times work for all of us: 

    • Option 1) Wednesdays at 14-15:30 GMT;Dates: April 15, 29, May 13, 27, June 10

    • Option 2) Thursdays at 12-13:30 GMT;Dates: April 16, 30, May 14, 28, June 11

    • Option 3) Thursdays at 14-15:30 GMT;Dates: April 16, 30, May 14, 28, June 11

  • 3) Setting info session webinar - give a presentation to the ESA Science Hub researchers to engage potential participants.

  • This is an opportunity for potential participants to learn about Openscapes and the Champion program and to consider whether it’s right for them.

  • Can we present in an existing session? Who organizes it? What do they need from us (bio, abstract)?

Subject: Openscapes Champions Planning

Hi All,

I hope you’re having a good week. Our Openscapes team has started our planning process for the Champions Cohort and are excited!

We’d like to share about this in our next meeting. Our goals are to introduce our process, discuss with you, and get feedback from you on our proposed dates and engagement strategy for the Cohort. Another goal is to introduce you to my colleague Stefanie who leads the infrastructure setup for the Cohort.

Cheers, Julie

Champions Engagement Spreadsheet

When we engage with a new community for a Champions Cohort we make a copy of OpenscapesCohortEngagement [ template ] spreadsheet and populate it.

TODO: dev more; POP it.

Purpose:

Outcomes:

Process:

Audience:

POP planning tool

Spreadsheet Tabs:

  • stakeholder groups
  • potential participants - starting from highest priority group. Can use ORCID website to quickly review their fields
  • engagement - Places to cross-post to engage people to self-nominate
  • mentor possibilities
  • checklist