Mentors Framework

The Mentors Framework is something that we’ve developed first through our work with NASA Openscapes, co-led with Erin Robinson of Metadata Game Changers.

This is a multi-year engine for culture change within organizations. This means a framework for sustainably scaling technical and social skill-building through helping people find what is common and working on it together. Mentors also support the Openscapes Champions Program and may teach in other learning formats such as multi-day hands-on workshops and hackathons.

An overview of how we build the Mentors Framework with NASA Earthdata staff across different data centers (Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs)) is detailed in our preprint: The Openscapes Flywheel: A framework for managers to facilitate and scale inclusive Open science practices (Robinson & Lowndes 2022).

Documentation: main places

As we develop the Mentor Community, there are 3 places, 3 audiences & 3 purposes for documentation.

We describe this more fully in the this talk at Posit Conf: Documenting things: openly for future us (Lowndes 2023).

Webpage

Audience: public. Main engagement information for anyone interested in the effort. Includes information on schedule and how to get involved.

Onboarding

Audience: mentors. Main information for folks of what to expect as they onboard. Includes all the tooling they should expect to access.

Approach Guide

Audience: Openscapes team. Main information for how we engage and onboard