Mentor Call Skills

We have five Mentor Calls as a full community. Here we detail the skills and practices Mentors experienced and experimented with in each Call.

How might you reuse these? Moving from “open science from something I do alone” to “open science is something I support in others”.

Call 1 Openscapes mindset for mentors

What does it mean to be a mentor? What does Open Science at NMFS mean?

  • Speaking up/sharing about yourself for 4 minutes - a challenge for some to take up that space, a challenge for others to limit to that space.

  • Keeping on time - as a speaker and as a timekeeper

  • Listening: giving space/silence. Not jumping in - get comfortable with discomfort

  • Live contributing to collaborative google doc - hear from more voices than we could only out loud, both time-wise and due to power structures

  • Learned emoji shortcut - not frivolous; a way to connect, side conversations and encouragement to build relationships

  • Saw us adjusting time on the fly in the doc and verbally - open facilitation

Your tasks before next Call

  1. Seaside Chat: Organize 1 hour with mentors at your center/office (or other people from other centers/offices), to discuss how you could improve workflows with open science in your own work, your own center, or more broadly. You could also discuss these readings 
  2. Readings: Read Shifting institutional culture to develop climate solutions with Open Science (2023 preprint) and How coaching skills have made us better open data science mentors (May 2023), both coauthored by NMFS Mentors, (and <20 mins combined). 
  3. (optional) Attend Coworking. We’ll send a recurring calendar invite for the weeks between Mentors Calls, Tuesdays, 12:30 - 1:30 pm PT. (find your local time). On Oct 24, Eli Holmes will report on PARR and the new 2022 memo and changes to our data workflows that are being proposed, and discuss how these changes will impact staff. (Eli is the NMFS Public Access of Research Results (PARR) representative on the NOAA PARR working group.)

Call 2 Developing strong open and collaborative Communities

What skills can we develop to support each other? What are the elements of successful open communities? What NOAA & NMFS open science communities do we like to participate in?

  • Active listening and asking powerful questions - coaching to empower people to find their own solutions rather than suggesting our ideas of what they should do

  • Vulnerability, yes! Shame, no - learning and building trust by getting curious with each other

  • Leveraging the experiences of a community - Kathryn, Ady & Christine presenting

  • You don’t have to be an expert to teach - Christine screensharing an efficiency tip she just learned

  • Sharing open resources for reuse - slides for 12-minute, 5-minute, or 1-slide only presentations

  • Crowdsourcing resources - a list of NOAA & NMFS communities we recommend

  • Making time for live clarification - open facilitation ’til we all know the plan

  • Bringing attention to or sharing gratitude for a colleague - coaching kudos and examples of raising people up

Your tasks before next Call

  1. Seaside Chat: Organize 1 hour with mentors at your center/office (or other people from other centers/offices), to discuss how you could improve workflows with open science in your own work, your own center, or more broadly. You could also discuss these readings
    1. Continue to add to ‘seeking mentors for Seaside Chat’ in the ‘Fall 2023 Openscapes mentors cohort’ sheet
    2. Share your Seaside Chat report outs in our doc
  2. Readings: Read 19 reasons why technologists don’t want to work at your government agency, Ben Balter
  3. Optional themed seaside chat. In between the full cohort calls, Eli will hold optional Seaside Chats open to any mentors. We’ll discuss Open Data and Open Science issues affecting NOAA Fisheries. Wed, Nov 8, Eli will give a brief update on what is happening at the NOAA level re Open Science. We’ve sent calendar invites.

Call 3 Experiential learning

We converged on open science challenges topics and people who want to work together and we learned about and practiced experiential learning.

  • Pitching ideas - to connect with colleagues

  • Listening - listening to understand, avoiding solutioneering

  • Asking powerful questions - often begin with “what”, “what else?”, never yes/no

  • Breaking down activities into teaching concepts - identifying and letting go of extra topics

  • Do - Reflect - Apply - approach to teaching

  • Time constraints - how constraints both for planning time and teaching time can help determine scope of an activity

Your tasks before next Call

  1. Seaside Chat: Have and report-out from your small-group Seaside Chats, building from topics in the Fall 2023 Openscapes mentors sheet

    1. What help do you need to arrange these?
    2. Share your meeting time so others can join. Options: post to our Google Space, Mentors Calendar, or add to column H in the Fall 2023 Openscapes mentors sheet.
    3. Share your Seaside Chat report outs in the SeasideChats_ReportOuts [ nmfs-openscapes-mentors ] doc.

  2. Open Science News: Share your Open Science news in the Open Science/Open Data Weekly Updates doc

  3. Readings: Tips and Tools for Gentle R Introductions (slides, by Allison Horst)

  4. Optional themed seaside chat - Nov 20, 1-2pm PT. In between the full cohort calls, we will hold optional themed Seaside Chats open to any mentors. Mon, Nov 20 1-2pm PT, Julie and Eli will give an overview of the Openscapes Champions Program, our goals for the Feb-Mar 2024 NMFS Champions Cohorts and how this fits into the broader plan for NMFS Open Science.

Call 4 Supporting teams to tackle workflow change through the Champions Program

We followed up on making connections through topic-based Seaside Chats, practiced skills for presenting and iterating new-to-us material to different audiences.

  • Calendaring - adding a shared group to a Google Calendar invite

  • Pitching to different audiences - how to reframe messaging and reuse slides to communicate

  • Sharing imperfect work - share early to co-design with feedback

  • Rapid prototyping - incorporating feedback live from 1st time, to present minutes later for 2nd time

  • Presenting someone else’s slides - how to let go of how you might have made the slides – and iterate them to make them work more for you

  • Presenting with little prep time - saying things out loud as a way to test and iterate

  • Asking questions and giving feedback - shaping Champions program comms/engagement together. Balancing keeping what works, improvement, and time.

  • Feedback framework - elicit more helpful feedback using explicit guides, from The Carpentries Instructor Training:

    • Content
      • Positive
      • Constructive
    • Delivery
      • Positive
      • Constructive

Your tasks before next Call

  1. Seaside Chat: join or host a topic-based Seaside Chat 

    1. You can find and add Seaside Chats on the NMFS Openscapes Mentors Calendar and post to our Google Space
    2. Report out in SeasideChats_ReportOuts [ nmfs-openscapes-mentors ]
    3. Continue to add to “seeking mentors for Seaside Chat” (Fall 2023 Openscapes mentors cohort sheet)

  2. Open Science / Open Data News: Share yours inDRAFT of OS/OD Weekly Updates and reuse/remix from each other to share back out in your newsletters

  3. Readings: 

    1. Agile teams don’t work without psychological safety skills

    2. The changing skill-set needed for project leaders

  4. Optional themed seaside chat. Wednesday, December 6, 3:30 - 4:30 ET / 12:30 - 1:30 PT (30 mins earlier than last time). This session will be on Cloud Computing. You will get a brief introduction to JupyterHubs, which is a popular platform for cloud computing. You’ll get to play around on a JupyterHub set up on NOAA’s Azure account. The hub has both RStudio and Jupyter Notebooks loaded. We will discuss how cloud computing platforms streamline and accelerate open science by increasing reproducibility and removing the “set-up” phase of a computing environment. 

Call 5 Reflections and shaping future plans

Celebrating what you’ve all accomplished together, and this is just the beginning!

  • Getting closure on a shared experience - individual reflection to notice progress and set goals, physical pen & paper for the mind-body process

  • Sharing challenges - in a space built on trust over time

  • Note-taking shortcuts - Em's efficiency tip sharing a new Google Doc feature for adding meeting notes, attendees list, and actions checklist 

  • Strategic organizing and planning - seeing how Mentors' cohort fits with upcoming year to support colleagues and broader NMFS open science initiatives

  • Value of microlearnings and microcommunications - the idea of reusing pieces of the blog post content as microcommunications in open science newsletters, as messages to colleagues, or to share in a meeting

  • Reading out loud from source material - emphasizing other people's work and giving credit by directly reading rather than summarizing

Continue our momentum!

  1. Cowork to co-write a blog post: Wednesday, December 20, 4 - 5pm ET; 1 - 2 pm PT (we've sent a calendar invite). 

  2. Seaside Chats: join or host a topic-based Seaside Chat in the New Year

    1. Share in NMFS Openscapes Mentors Google Space and Calendar
    2. Report out in SeasideChats_ReportOuts [ nmfs-openscapes-mentors ]

  3. Open Science / Open Data News: Share yours in DRAFT of OS/OD Weekly Updates and reuse/remix from each other to share back out in your newsletters

  4. Book club: Join the Openscapes Slack #bookclub channel

  5. Express your interest in the Winter 2024 Openscapes Champions Program Champions_Interest_Winter2024 [ NMFS-Openscapes ].