05 Call Digest

[stefaniebutland]

Hello @nmfs-openscapes/2022-noaa-nwfsc-fall-cohort !

Thank you all for our final session last week! It was really inspiring to see your work to improve your workflows and hear your plans to include more colleagues going forward. It’s so great to hear that many people will continue their Seaside Chats. Thank you for sharing so much with your colleagues, as well as your needs and ideas for leadership.

We’re excited to continue this momentum. As part of that, Eli Holmes (NWFSC) and Julie Lowndes (Openscapes) submitted a 3-year NMFS Openscapes proposal that supports further training and staff time (to NOAA BAA on Dec 6); you can help spread the word with your directors (2-page summary). Amanda Bradford presented to the PIFSC PSD (Protected Species Division) All Hands meeting (slides) and afterwards, in a real-time survey, when asked “What would help you manage your workload more effectively?” - 9 of 72 responses from 27 respondents mentioned open science, Openscapes, or coworking! Please reuse at your centers, and reply in this GitHub issue with other examples! And on January 26, a panel of Openscapes Mentors including Adyan Rios (SEFSC) and Josh London (AFSC) will present “Better science for future us: Openscapes stories and approaches for the Year of Open Science” at the ESIP Winter Meeting “Opening Doors to Open Science”.

Increasing the visibility and value of the work you’re doing is important. You can add Openscapes to your CV: “Professional Development: Openscapes Champions Program, September - November, 2022 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7407247”.

We look forward to watching you advance on your journeys! We’ve got several ways to stay in touch.

• If you can make it, please join us for a ~3 month check in on Wednesday, February 22, 1:00 - 2:00 pm PT / 4:00 - 5:00 ET, so we can see what everyone is up to. Add it to your Calendar.
• You’re welcome to join Openscapes Slack (if you haven’t already) where your colleagues across NMFS and other Openscapes Champions are. Email Stef if you’d like an invitation and some orientation.
• The National Stock Assessment Program is hosting cross-center training for R, Rstudio IDE, and Posit Connect starting December 13th and continuing every 2nd Tuesday (Google Calendar). The topic for December 13th is "Most useful features of RStudio IDE you may not know"
• Join regular events of the NMFS R User Group (Google Calendar)

Openscapes would love your feedback so we can improve and support future cohorts - including NMFS; please fill out this survey by Dec 20.

Please have someone from each team email/direct message Julie a physical address where we can send stickers via postal service! We'll ask that you distribute them within your team.

Look for a summary post on the Openscapes blog in January and share it with your colleagues. In the meantime, use our Openscapes Spotify Playlist for inspiration - updated with tunes from across all 4 NMFS Cohorts!!

Below is a light digest of Call 5.

Wishing you all a restful holiday season,

Stef, Julie, Eli, Christine, Bai, Erin

Digest: Cohort Call 05 [ 2022-noaa-nwfsc-fall ]

Cohort Google Drive folder - contains agendas, video recordings, slides, pathways folder

nmfs-openscapes.github.io/2022-noaa-nwfsc-fall - cohort webpage

Goals: People shared their Pathways and we discussed next steps going forward.

Teams' Pathways are located in the Pathways subfolder. If you haven’t yet, please add your slides there so your colleagues might refer to them.

Example 1: PIFSC Protected Species Division created a new GitHub organization and information hub (using Quarto)

Example 2: AFSC Pcod tagging & Marvels group did some really foundational work; used a “Mural” board to map out their activities and roles together.

Example 3: NWFSC Ecosystem Status Report Automation team was united by working on reports with many contributors of maps, time series data that become 20-page reports.

Example 4: the SEFSC Trawl and Plankton Branch team focused on “Where are we going and how do we get there”, and plans to do better documentation, use GitHub, which in the near-term involves setting up discussions to include more team members and set up collaborative processes.

A few lines from shared notes in the Agenda doc, excerpted from all 4 NMFS Cohorts

Upon completing Openscapes, how do you feel about your needs and how you are supported to meet those needs?

• Needs are met for introducing me and my team to open science and its principles. But, the model is very much on having “us” solve the problem of “our” workflow. When will leadership or the consumers of our work value the open science version of products more (exclusively) such that we are not alone in trying to change agency culture? +1+1+1+1+1
• Time came up in several pathways presentations - time to learn new skills, set up new workflows, and do this while getting buy-in from others within a group that have different skills and experiences with the groups work (ie years at nmfs)+1+1+1
  • Not only carving out time but getting recognized for the time you give
• … it feels like we’re putting out fires with a spray bottle and I’d like to move away from that using some of what I’ve learned here and from my coworkers
• LOTS of new tools to consider. It's a bit overwhelming but I'm glad all the materials are so well recorded so I can return to them as I progress. This community is helpful - I know there are folks I can turn to if/when I need help! +1+1+1+1+1
• I feel like I need to continue the group project and co-working to keep myself on track. I need to set more time to learn. +1+1+1+1+1+1
• Before openscapes, our group had the beginnings of some momentum to create general, centralized protocols and analysis pipelines. The openscapes program really pushed us to the next level and gave us ideas of how to implement what we were thinking of designing for our group. Our advisor has supported us taking time to continue working on this organization and really cares about reproducibility. We are set up well to continue implementing our repos and shared resources.
• I feel like I’m better able to identify my needs and more confident about reaching out to others for help/ideas to solve challenges. Also more confident to experiment and fail until I get it right! +1
• The exposure to tools and approaches (and lowering activation barriers) has been fantastic; the challenge will be continuing to convince self and other of value in investing “non-science” time to increase efficiency of science. There’s a deficit here that needs overcoming … and needs proper accounting in evaluations.+1+1+1+1

Upon completing Openscapes, what are your ideas and needs for your team’s future progress?

• There is a bit of a disconnect between the horizontal structure of open science and the top down structure of government agencies. There needs to be more communication with leadership about how to relax hierarchical structures inhibiting open science principles +1
• …encouraging open coding/freedom to fail/safe collaborations, etc.
• I think moving toward workflows that create efficiency, accessibility, and reproducibility, where we aren’t constantly regrouping and emailing and meeting about the same things. … at least starting each effort with having everyone address the question, “how will we not have to redo the work that we are doing right now?”
• We are going to continue to meet every other week for an hour to check in on progress of our assigned repos. We hope to get the rest of our lab on as members of our github organization so that they can add thoughts as well.

Discussion

• These things aren’t visible to leadership but will eventually come to a head.
  • Can we convert the open science convo into a best available science and records retention +1
• It would be really interesting to think about openscapes in the perspective of best available science and records retention -> convert open science into govt speak
  • +1 ...a bunch of us were just at a best practices for science workshop and reproducibility and open science barely even came up as a "best practice" which was really surprising to me
• How do you think about bringing in the consumers of our products? If it came top-down, then no one would question the need to work more openly.
• Learn together first, then go do things on our own. That simple switch gives you more time.

Thank you so much! Please reuse/remix resources and stay in touch

• NMFS Open Science: https://nmfs-opensci.github.io
  • Links to FIT, FIMS, R Users Group, ResourceBook
• NMFS Openscapes: https://nmfs-openscapes.github.io
• openscapes.org
  • /series: Champions program lesson series
  • /media: slide decks, publications, media
  • /blog: stories from the community
• github: @openscapes
  • how_we_work, seaside-chats: Examples from previous cohorts
• twitter: @openscapes
• artwork: by the amazing Allison Horst