03 Call Digest [ 2024-nmfs-champions ]

[stefaniebutland]

Hi @nmfs-openscapes/2024-nmfs-champions-cohort & @nmfs-openscapes/2024-mentors !

Thank you to Greg Williams and Nick Tolimieri (NWFSC) and Lyn deWitt (SWFSC) for a great presentation on their approach to Data Strategies for the California Current Ecosystem Status Reports!! Such awesome work, to see where you are now and how it started by drawing out that Pathway and seeing a place to start, with the tidy data & metadata. 👏🏻 👏🏻. An outstanding example of healthy team culture.

Below is a light digest of Call 03, with links to all resources, and a reminder about your tasks. The notes and reflections you are all adding to our collaborative agenda docs are a goldmine. We’ve included below a few lines from across all 3 Cohorts.

Cheers,

Stef, Julie, Eli

Digest: Cohort Call 03 [ 2024-nmfs-champions ]

Your Cohort Google folders contain all agendas, recordings, pathways spreadsheets

• Openscapes-CohortCalls [ 2024-nmfs-champions-a ]

• Openscapes-CohortCalls [ 2024-nmfs-champions-b ]

• Openscapes-CohortCalls [ 2024-nmfs-champions-c ]

Cohort repo & webpage 

Goals: ‎We discussed team culture and data strategies for future us.

Tasks: please see your Cohort’s Agenda doc (under Closing)  for details

1. Have a Seaside Chat with your peer group or team
2. Continue your Pathway - shifting to “Next Steps”, think about onboarding/offboarding
3. (optional) Attend Coworking. Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:00 -1:00 pm PT / 3:00 - 4:00 pm ET. Come prepared to get your own work done, ask questions, or listen in to other conversations and screensharing. We’ll have a Pathways breakout room. 

Slide Decks and Media:

• Team Culture and psychological safety (slides)
• Data Strategies from the California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (CCIEA) Status Report Automation Team, NWFSC: Nick Tolimieri, Greg Williams; SWFSC: Lynn deWitt (slides)

A few lines from shared notes in the Agenda doc 

Team Culture

• Sharing that you don’t have all the background (being vulnerable) opens up others to get everyone on the same page +2 
• Love the silent journaling that we do here in openscapes! It encourages people who might be too shy to speak out to participate. It can be easier sometimes to type your thoughts than speak them +1+1+1+1
•  “Rosebush” method of updates +1 + 1 +1 
  • Rose - something that went well
  • Bud - something that is starting
  • Thorn - something that is difficult
  • May not have all 3 in any given time
  • Normalize that everyone has “thorns”
• Offering open ended questions related to a problem to foster a variety of solutions
• Offering processing time (2-3 min) to sit and think about a problem/solution 
• Agenda sent out in advance which allows for pre-processing, note taking, and allows for breathing room which leaves space for creativity
• Set meeting expectations at the start of every meeting 
• Multiple ways of communication in a meeting is important. 
• Just the simple phrase, ‘that’s a good question’ is helpful to me, sometimes I think I'm asking a ‘dumb  question’ and instantly regret asking! But then feel the relief when the person affirms that it’s not. +1+1

Data Strategies with the California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (CCIEA) Status Report Automation Team, NWFSC: Nick Tolimieri, Greg Williams; SWFSC: Lynn deWitt. (CCIEA website; California Current Ecosystem Status Reports; Highlights of the 2023-24 California Ecosystem Status Report)

• IEA reports started in 2012, introduced Openscapes approaches 2022. Have been able to improve transparency and succession. The Pathways conceptual model helped the team see what was possible together, even though it’d already been 10 years. Easier for leads to step off the project and new lead editors to step in, smooth transition. 
• Earliest realization: we’re not alone, other teams have this need too
• Psychological safety - removed fear of speaking up, knowing others dealing with similar work challenges. Seaside Chats helped establish this!
• How freeing up all this time lets us think about interpretation of the results more (like it feels obvious but hearing it out loud really struck me) 💯
• I love the idea of streamlining incoming data and requiring it to be tidy from the start. I currently spend a great deal of time reformatting emailed data to a consistent, tidy format.+1+1
• I’m interested to know the amount of “growing pains” that were needed to get everyone to submit data in a consistent format +1
  • Greg & Lynn had meetings with every single data provider and shared the plan and they were largely onboard!
• Big effort - on the tech setup and also on helping people know about, agree to, and have skills to shift to tidy data to submit. 
• Automatic writing of alt text! I will be looking into that+2+1+1+1
• just love the “old data” label. +1 +1+1+1
• Metadata was treated as a dataset itself  
• Seems like almost everyone has reports to write, so having dedicated workshops to start us all out would be super beneficial - like project management 101 on Git with quarto projects