Openscapes Champions Lesson Series

Open educational resources for Openscapes Champions

Author

Openscapes team

Published

May 13, 2025

Welcome

Hello! This is the lesson series for the Openscapes Champions program, an open data science mentorship program for science teams. This is a professional development and leadership opportunity for teams to reimagine data analysis and stewardship as a collaborative effort, develop modern skills that are of immediate value to them, and cultivate collaborative and inclusive research communities. Champions is not a typical training workshop. Through Openscapes cohorts, people focus on their own work and their own personal or team goals as they learn open science concepts, tooling, and practices with examples from their peers. It is a remote-by-design program, launched in 2019.

A landscape consisting of a grassy meadow next to a sandy beach and ocean, a winding river, and distant mountains. In the foreground, a sad bunny and skunk are working alone on their laptops, each with a rain cloud over their heads. Nearby is a trailhead with a fox holding a 'Welcome!' sign for a variety of different critters to see. Past the trailhead are branching pathways through the Openscapes landscape. No matter the path, however, there are small groups of animals working together to find their way. Nods to data science are scattered throughout the image, including mountains made of data points and a satellite in the sky — We think about open science like a landscape, with many paths forward. The Champions Program mentors researchers, meeting them at the trailhead to help them move from lonely science to team science as they identify their common needs and start navigating the landscape together with a cohort of their peers. Artwork by Allison Horst.

All Champions Program resources are designed to also be a self-paced learning resource, and we know many people use the Champions Lesson Series for their own learning and for mentoring others, which is awesome. This Champions Lesson Series is improved openly and iteratively, and the most recent version always available online for reuse and remix. Each chapter in our Core Lessons focus on building a mindset and skillset for collaborative, reproducible workflows and culture within teams, while developing sustained learning practices connected with broader communities.

About

Openscapes

Openscapes is an open source approach and movement that helps researchers and those supporting research find each other and feel empowered to conduct data-intensive science. Through a creative approach drawing inspiration and skills from many places, we provide structures for technical skill-building, collaborative teamwork, and inclusive community development. Our work builds from many others in the open movement.

Learn more about Openscapes initiatives through our many other open resources, media, and events, and connect with us.

This Series Book

The Series is written (and always improving) to be used as a reference, to teach, as self-paced learning, and for reuse and remix (“forking”, to borrow a term from open source software). And also, awesomely, it’s created with the same tools and practices we will be talking about: R/RStudio - originally bookdown and now quarto - and GitHub.

Citation

All material in the Openscapes Lesson Series is available under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.

Please cite the Openscapes Champions Lesson Series through the project’s Zenodo archive using DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7407246. This DOI represents all versions, and will always resolve to the latest one.

The citation will look something like:

The Openscapes Core Team, Julia Stewart Lowndes & Erin Robinson. (2022). Openscapes Champions Lesson Series (2022.12). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7407247

Please visit the Lesson Series DOI link to get the most recent version - the one above is not automatically generated and may be out of date if we release an updated version.

Openscapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.