05 Cohort Call Digest [ 2024-SWRCB ]

[madiboynton]

Hi @Openscapes/2024-swrcb-fall-cohort,

Thanks for a great fifth session last Wednesday. A huge thanks to the awesome pair of teams for sharing their Pathways with us, contributing to conversations, and your commitment to trying new things throughout this Openscapes process. We loved hearing about your Pathways last week, especially the unique approaches to collaborating on creating your Pathway and the awesome visual aids like draw.io! We are looking forward to continued conversations and momentum around how the Water Boards community can do better science in less time - for future you, your teams, and your collaborators!

A few things to wrap up:

1. Openscapes survey If you did not have a chance to complete the survey last Wednesday, please provide your feedback here! Openscapes improves with each cohort based on your feedback.
2. Want to be a mentor in 2025? We want to grow Openscapes at the Water Boards, so we can reach more teams and share what we’re learning with more folks, but we need help to grow! Please contact Anna via email or Teams chat if you’re interested in exploring whether being an Openscapes Mentor in 2025 is a good fit for you.
3. Openscapes Champions Cohort 2-month Follow-Up will take place Wed., Dec 4, 9:30 am - 10:30 am via Teams

We are so grateful for your thoughtful engagement and impressed with your progress and Pathways. We hope you continue to iterate your Seaside Chats (or whatever other skills or tools you picked up) with your teams! Below is a light digest of Call 5.

Please don’t forget to keep in touch, ask for help, and share successes and celebrations on our shared 2024 Water Boards Openscapes Teams Channel!

Cheers,
Madi & the rest of the Mentor + Instruction Team

Digest: Cohort Call 5 [ 2024-SWRCB ]

Cohort SharePoint Folder - contains agendas, slides, recordings and the Pathway template
Cohort GitHub Repository
Cohort Webpage
Water Boards' Openscapes Teams Channel - connect with all Openscapes Champions cohorts at the Water Board

Goals: Each team shared their Pathway, and we discussed how to keep momentum going forward.

Themes that came across through the final Pathways shares:

• Recognizing great culture that already exists in teams and intentionally working to continue nurturing it
• Management mindset and transparency, structure around meeting systems, and thoughtful executive decisions can make or break project success, team morale, and efficiency.
• Leaning into teammates’ individual strengths and learning styles builds culture and improves communication
• Onboarding processes need improvement and could benefit from an Openscapes-style glow-up
• Continuing education, offering leadership opportunities, and prioritizing culture are essential and productive investments in future success

Resources:

• PathwayShare Folder - if you’re open to sharing your Pathway with the rest of the cohort - upload it here!
• “Graduation gift” - Openscapes badges by Allison Horst!
• Download from here: openscapes_hex_badge.png
• You can put it on your website, like Openscapes at the Water Boards, the Wood Lab and the Fay Lab!

Both teams had beautiful, smart Pathways! Here are a few highlights from the shared Agenda notes doc:

• RTO policy cost us 1/3 of the institutional knowledge on our team and needed expertise we were trying to hire. This hiring freeze is seriously hampering our ability to do time-sensitive work (execute our contract, test telemetry integration to UPWARD). We won’t be able to deliver as good a Telemetry Project because of these executive decisions. +100. Wow +100 +1+1 +1+1 +100

• different people have different brains – expectations help make that good instead of confusing: https://cawaterboarddatacenter.github.io/swamp-manual/culture/expectations.html

• One thing I really appreciate as a pretty new water boards employee (coming from a different state agency) is there really is a culture of continued learning. Just wanted to shout that out because it was a refreshing change after years of begging people to use newer tools at my old job. (Like, we were using data sets that caused excel to crash due to size and still had to beg people to consider R). +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +100

• UST Evaluation Team:

  • OH! They added a priorities column – great idea to figure out what is the most important/urgent thing to tackle next! +1 +1
  • Figuring out which software works best for all members of the team +1

• WaTR:

  • Team plans to have a culture chat / set standards with their contractor – cool!
  • Team prioritizing data gathering before project “start” +1

[AHolder1]

Woooo! Congrats again to Fall 2024 Water Boards Openscapes Champions!!!! 😃

[jules32]

Popping by to say +100, congrats all, so awesome!