Welcome to Openscapes’ eighth newsletter! If you’re interested in seeing these infrequent updates in your inbox, please sign up here (linked from our get involved page). And! If you have signed up but did not see this in your inbox, please check your spam folder!
Happy New Year! 2023 saw lots of good momentum for kinder, open science and we are excited for much more change-making to come this year. In 2024 we will be braver in emphasizing the connections between open science and climate solutions, between personal growth and institutional change, and how practicing kinder science together can change the culture of science. Small things, daily, over time, compound to have big impacts.
We’re kicking off 2024 with the second annual Pathways to Open Science program that starts this week! This is an ongoing collaboration with Black in Marine Science (BIMS), Black Women in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Science (BWEEMS), and HBCU marine science professors led by Ileana Fenwick, with Alex Davis, PhD and Aneese Williams. Thanks to new funding from the Mozilla Foundation’s Alumni Connection grants, we’re excited to collaborate with PREreview and Antoinette Foster, PhD to bring expertise in values-guided career navigation and anti-racist scholarly review to the programming this year. Register here if you’re a Black marine or environmental scientist and/or an HBCU student. If you are an ally, please help us amplify Black voices; we suggest allies do not sign up for this particular series.
Join us for our February Community Call: GitHub for NASA Openscapes community calendaring & project management - An open work in progress. We invite you to come see how the NASA Openscapes Mentors are co-organizing an open calendar and shared tasks — bring your questions and your experience!
Seeing this paper “Welcoming More Participation in Open Data Science for the Oceans” (Fredston and Lowndes, 2024) published in the Annual Review of Marine Science made a great start to the year!
We’ll be sharing more events and goals for 2024 in the coming months.
Some 2023 Highlights
We are continually iterating and documenting what works as we learn from our experiences collaborating and teaching. This year we’ve focused on communicating this in a few talks, emphasizing the Flywheel as an open source tool as we described in a talk at the AGU fall meeting and documenting things openly for future us, like onboarding, at the Posit conference in September.
Openscapes Mentors were an important part of the Year of Open Science. Together, across NASA Earthdata, NOAA Fisheries, California Water Boards, Pathways to Open Science, EPA, and Fred Hutch, we learned coaching skills that have made us better open data science mentors, and co-wrote a preprint Shifting institutional culture to develop climate solutions with Open Science that is in review. California Water Boards ran their second annual Champions Cohort to support their colleagues to meet open, data, and equity goals. NOAA Fisheries shared their Open Data and Open Science vision at the summer ESIP meeting! With NOAA Fisheries staff, we co-designed a NOAA Fisheries Openscapes Mentors program modeled from the NASA Openscapes Mentors Framework.
NASA Openscapes progress focused on learning and codeveloping with the broader open science community via hackdays focused on R, MATLAB, the Earthdata Cloud Cookbook, and 2i2c Openscapes JupyterHub access policies. Mentors across 11 NASA data centers continue improving how we teach and support researchers in the Cloud. We became better teachers through Carpentries Instructor training and subcommunities and applied these skills as we continued to support researchers via workshops, hackathons, and Champions Cohorts. It was truly energizing to come together in person with so many NASA Openscapes Mentors and collaborators at the summer ESIP and winter AGU meetings!
We launched two new annual programs in 2023: the Pathways to Open Science program for Black marine and environmental scientists, with our second offering kicking off this week, and the Reflections program that is a lightweight commitment for individuals to identify and plan around their workflow needs. We’ll share registration information ahead of the next offering in May 2024 on the events page.
We also invested in sustainability for the Openscapes community. We worked with SGX3/SGCI Focus Week in San Diego in May to re-focus on sustainability, as well as with Nancy Maron to reflect on, communicate, and plan forward from Openscapes’ First Five Years. This work informed our submission to the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Open Science Recognition Challenge. On the technical side, we set up a new Zenodo Openscapes Community to help people find and cite Openscapes things and we migrated our website from blogdown to Quarto.
We’ve been grateful to (re)connect with colleagues virtually and in person at ESIP, AGU, The Carpentries, Posit, The Open Environmental Data Project, and CSCCE Tools Trials. We moved our social media to Mastodon and have found it challenging to reestablish the nexus of open source, environmental/Earth science, and inclusive learning that we had previously. In 2024 we will work to reconnect.
We are looking forward to continuing this important work with researchers and those supporting research!
Photo by Elliot Lowndes
Citation
@online{lowndes2024,
author = {Lowndes, Julie and Butland, Stefanie},
title = {Openscapes {Newsletter} \#8: {Winter} 2024},
date = {2024-01-24},
url = {https://openscapes.org/blog/2024-01-24-news-jan-2024/},
langid = {en}
}