Training synthesis science teams in virtual collaboration to support the switch to distributed research

Abstract:

In March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic exploded around the world and travel and in person gatherings ground to a halt, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) faced the challenge of how to launch collaborative synthesis science projects and maintain their productivity in a newly all-virtual format. Every year through its 25 year history as a synthesis research center, NCEAS has funded and hosted collaborative working groups of scientists from around the world. These multi-institution, interdisciplinary, and often cross-sector teams synthesize and analyze existing data to advance scientific understanding and solve important environmental problems. Intensive in-person working group meetings have been an essential component of NCEAS' team science model. How were new distributed teams going to create the conditions for successful collaboration without that face-to-face interaction? How were team members, who may have never met, going to develop the rapport and trust needed to work productively together? And how would they manage a complex, data-intensive collaboration at a distance?

To answer this challenge, we launched a rapid training effort to deliver critical collaboration skills to working groups from two programs: the Science for Nature and People Partnership and the Long Term Ecological Research Network. In the first workshop, we focused on mentorship and facilitation training to develop skills, habits, and mindsets to make remote work and collaborative synthesis science more efficient and resilient, modeling the behaviors and tools we were teaching throughout. In the second workshop, we focused on empowering Working Groups to collaboratively develop reproducible analytical workflows for data-driven projects. Participants had the opportunity to brainstorm data management and computing needs and experience collaborative coding through hands-on exercises. Four teams went through the training and are now actively moving their research collaborations forward. Drawing from the workshop content and the experiences of these and other NCEAS research teams who are continuously adapting to the dynamic research landscape, we share a set of emergent best practices, tools and tips to boost remote collaborative synthesis science.