Program Summary

Openscapes Champions is an open data science mentorship program for science teams

Overview

Openscapes Champions helps people reimagine data analysis & stewardship as a collaborative effort, develop modern skills that are of immediate value to them, and cultivate collaborative and inclusive research communities. The Champions program was built from experience and has supported professionals in academia, government, and non-profit groups — and we have the improved the program from their needs and from current practices in the open science community. This transformational 10-week program consists of biweekly, 1.5-hour remote group sessions, with additional optional coworking times.

Program Details

Openscapes Champions is a multi-month program that is led remotely and designed to ignite incremental and sustainable change within research groups — and beyond. The program remotely convenes a cohort of science teams (7-10 teams of up to 5 people; 40 people max) twice per month over two months for 1.5-hour video calls that we call Cohort Calls. This is not a workshop. It is cohort-based facilitated sessions to help people collaboratively evolve their work (work they’re already doing) with input from peers. It helps people reflect on and modernize how they work!

The Champions program is designed so that small time requirements over longer time frames fosters incremental change, accountability, and community building within the realities of people’s busy schedules, varying expertise and needs. Each Cohort Call uses the Champions Lesson Series you are reading; it is an open curriculum that is openly iterated with new lessons and peer examples, and with the most recent version always available online. The core lessons were originally based on what was instrumental in the Ocean Health Index team’s path to better science in less time, and each chapter includes slides for core and newly developed lessons taught and iterated for Cohort Calls. We start off each call with a reminder of our Code of Conduct and provide multiple channels for participation, including through silent contributions to the Agenda with live note-taking, breakout groups, and full-group discussions. Each call closes with an efficiency tip and an inclusion tip to incorporate into daily practice.

Participants attend as teams — or sometimes individuals or subsets from teams — and come prepared for engaged participation as a whole cohort and within smaller breakout groups. Discussions focus around collaborative mindsets, norms, and software to enable open, reproducible, inclusive research, introducing tooling like R, Python, tidyverse, GitHub, RMarkdown/Quarto, Google Drive, JupyterHubs, metadata and practices from open source communities, inclusive design, psychological safely, facilitation techniques, with examples from relevant research domains including the Ocean Health Index and previous Champions. Teams intentionally have a mix of data/coding/documentation experience and responsibilities. All skills and interests welcome - there are no coding prerequisites to participate.

The Openscapes Champions program is designed so that everyone can learn new approaches and make progress, no matter where they are starting from. People sometimes participate repeatedly over years and focus on new things each time. Each team creates a Pathway document to start thinking about where they are now in terms of the tools and practices for reproducibility, collaboration, communication, and culture. Throughout the Cohort, teams develop their Pathway to help identify, prioritize and articulate their needs and next steps. Pathway progress from each team is presented in the final session, which helps participants practice articulating their data workflow plans and needs, and see similarities and allies across the cohort to continue on these paths together.

With Cohort Calls occurring twice monthly on alternating weeks, the time in between each session enables participants to reflect and practice new concepts while the Openscapes team incorporates feedback and iterates to better support cohort needs. One way we suggest reinforcing this is through a regular practice of self-organized team data-workflow meetings (“Seaside Chats”) in the alternating weeks between cohort calls. This gives people an opportunity to share their learning with their broader team or collaborators and to establish norms around data and code management and inclusive onboarding practices, and identify things they want to learn together and things they can teach each other. The Openscapes team also facilitates Coworking sessions, where people can do their own work at the same time together, with opportunities to check in, ask questions, and screenshare to get feedback or solve a problem.

The remote- and cohort-nature of the program is designed to reinforce each other’s learnings and networks across participating teams. This has been especially important for remote and hybrid work, onboarding new colleagues, and establishing the positive culture we want in science. It also has helped people develop leadership skills as they advance in their careers. We have led over 20 Champions Cohorts with over 700 participants from academia, federal and state agencies (US and Canada), and non profits. The value of the Champions program is that it has helped participants make progress on making their own workflows more efficient and reproducible, and it has helped them connect more with their peers. Further, it has also connected them across cohorts and other parts of open science and beyond, as we all contribute to changing the culture of science.