Effective Communications Strategy for Data-Intensive Science Communities

1. GeoData 2011 The “Fir” team, March 3, morning breakout session Janine Aquino, B. DeWayne Branch, Percy Donaghay, David Fulker, John Graybeal, Steven Hankin, Vivian Hutchison, Clifford Jacobs, Kerstin Lehnert, Dmitry Mozzherin, Shanan Peters, Giri Palanisamy, Bharath Prithivirah, Lisa Raymond, Walter Snyder, Steven Tessler, Ron Weaver, Eric Wolf, Eva Zanzerkia, Stephen Zednik http://etherpad.ooici.org/geodata-fir2

2. What do you see as the important elements of a communications strategy to meet the needs of the research and agency communities? Do these include demographically underserved communities (including aspects of management and data infrastructures)?

3. What do you see as the important elements of a communications strategy to meet the needs of the research and agency communities? Do these include demographically underserved communities (including aspects of management and data infrastructures)?

4. In our context a "communication strategy" is one that fosters, through human interaction, transformative levels of data fluency, data exchange, and data use across all communities that support or engage in data-intensive science.

5. Who are the audiences/communities that we must engage in our communication effort? • Scientists • Agency Management (sponsors) • Granting Institutions • Educators • Students – Graduates, Undergraduates, and even K-12

6. What is to be communicated? How data management can transform science

7. What does that mean? • Clear examples that illustrate the benefits of using specific (existing) tools, standards, practices, and services • The Value Proposition: Society benefits profoundly from data-intensive science, and the science benefits from improved practices • Reframing data ‘problems’ as opportunities • The excitement of data-driven discovery Side benefit: the building of new potential that arises from membership in a “community of practice”

8. What the Data Management Community NEEDS • More data producers need to take their data management responsibilities seriously • More program leaders and management types need to take their data management responsibilities seriously

9. What is the Strategy? • Training of research practitioners • Informational web sites • Policy statements (agencies, professional societies) • Education (training, conferences, curricula) • Building communities of interest • Reward systems for data management Why not an NSF award for “Best Managed Dataset”? • Beer • Spacebook

10. What is the Strategy? Part 2 Two-way Communication Feedback loops are necessary for improving data management practices that result in better relationships and broader uses of data Maybe some data managers need to take their users needs more seriously…

11. Who are the under-served communities? We did not focus on this topic • What is meant by underserved communities? • Demographically underserved communities? • Developed nations working with undeveloped nations • MSSRF.org  • Ushahidi.org

12. If you educate (convince) a senior scientist of the merits of good data management practices, will (s)he change behaviors and pass same onto colleagues and students? Probably not without incentives

13. What happens when ‘poorly managed data’ are required to be shared with others? Is there a risk to scientists when they don’t do it right? What happens when people can’t use the data they retrieve? Etc…. That’s why we are here

14. Questions? http://etherpad.ooici.org/geodata-fir2