Wednesday Working Group Topics

1. Collaboratory Development:– Community issues, workshops, cross-disciplinary

communications, development of cross-program synergy

2. Data Issues:– Data description, quality, feedback, data sharing, rapid

online analysis, coordinating with broader program data (SEARCH/AON, etc)

3. Outreach, Education, and Policy RecommendationsEach group report back with 3-5 prioritized

recommendations

Approaches to building a collaboratory

• Develop a social network, bringing together people who don’t usually talk to each other. Does this need to be physical? e.g. meetings, taking modelers to the field, taking sociologists to NCAR?

• Electronic bulletin board—funded fora for communicating questions across disciplines.

• Three goals are unique to Arctic System Science: Predictions, Improved Understanding, Policy relevant information.

How to build a collaboratory—learning from the past.

• Biocomplexity teams need to be built and reviewed in real time by the rest of the community.

• Funding determines which communities come together.

• Lessons to be learned from past efforts: Teams need to be inclusive, not competitive. A diversity of groups need to be on a single team.

• Teams should be dynamic.

• Cross-disciplinary questions aren’t always well formed –meaning we’re in the pre-proposal stage.

• Some teams are ready to go and they can spur the activities in the other groups—great for leveraging of further research proposals.

• Let’s be clear on the over-arching goals.– Goals or approaches have to by synergistic– Grand Model?– Predictions, understanding, policy relevance?

What do we really want?

• We want to find mechanisms for continuous team mechanisms.

• One problem is that we have to have a team before we write a proposal—how does that happen?

• How do we build a community?• How do we make cultural changes?• How do we not fail?

• Synthesis workshops have been an attempt. Should we do more of these?

• Mini sabbaticals? -even if only for a month? • Take a modeler out to do field work?• Incentives: money and fear.• Justifying small sabbaticals needs to be

attached to some bigger program.• Impediments:

– writing a fifteen page proposal for a one week sabbatical,

– lack of a perceived opportunity

• We need a layered program with a dedicated portion of money for small cross-disciplinary efforts.

Key Steps for Creating a Collaboratory

• Pathway for cross-disciplinary work:– Seed of an idea – Search for common interest– Find some interested people, converse– Good, amorphous ideas– Find ways to have a longer conversation

• Webcast, exchange ideas, small workshop

– If it’s a good idea, write a proposal– Report back to the collaboratory (mandatory).

• How can we reduce the impedance for this process?• Collaboratory would have tools for building these

successful cases.

ARCSS has been doing this.

• Ask Charley how this has been going.• Extensions to existing projects.• Incentives haven’t worked because of

lack of funding. – Review panels have honoraria that

motivate people to take the time to review.– Supplemental funding can be requested for

specific proposals. – NSF can increase the pot specifically for

cross-disciplinary work.

There are incentives that are not financial

• Let’s think more broadly.• Oil and gas industry.• Partner with the other industry.• Soft money people: money is a big incentive.• Model synchronization and merging.

– A center for modeling intercomparison– A center for biological modeling intercomparsions and a

separate center for ice modeling intercomparisons?– Cross sharing when money is tight

• A distributed center:– Needs to be very communicative– Core group for standards,protocols and procedures.– Establish best practics and protocols to make sure output is

useful.

Priorities to promote Arctic System Science: Predictions, Improved

Understanding, Policy relevant information.

• Funding an ARCSS center or system of centers to facilitate synthesis studies, scientific and educational linkeages, collaborative research and develop data standards and practices.

– Model synchronization and model/data integrations– A network of experts who can deal with technical or data issues.– Short term visiting residents– e.g. E-blogs to facilitate community discourse

• Mechanisms to supply support on a range of scales (sometimes very small, sometimes very large and everything in between).

– NSF (and perhaps ARCUS) needs to be prepared for non-standard requests.

– e.g. Supplemental request on existing projects to support exploratory, cross-disciplinary research.

– Build on existing successes from large inter-disciplinary programs (e.g. biocomplexity, freshwater integration)

• Workshops to distill products for synthesis, prediction and policy relevance.

White Board Summary• Problem solving centers for model synchronization and

model-data integration• Blogs and interactive on-line fora• Supplements to awards for focused team building• New Announcement of Opportunity for collaboratories• Additional funding mechanisms to span from SGER’s to

large initiatives• Methodology training sessions• Workshops to distill products for prediction and policy• Short- to long-term residential centers for focused, face-

to-face collaboration (with incentives).• Centers for: standards of practice, science and

education linkeages, synthesis studies.