Services for Open Science Groups

Our team at OrgMycology work with all sorts of organizations, but our “home base” tends to be in open science–that is, organizations and projects that develop open source software, collect and manage open data, provide open scientific communication services, and generally move scientific research toward sharing and accessibility. We always welcome conversations with teams outside of Open Science as well.

Given that our skills are heavy in the qualitative research department, we often help with services around:

• Introspection: Understanding how open science communities came to be, what their strengths are, what they have struggled with, challenges, and ways to manage as needs change.
• Strategy: Supporting open source leaders with coaching, business model exploration, and financial sustainment approaches. 
• Leadership and Management: Working with leadership to deepen their leadership skills and to map organizational structure to organizational priorities. Creating skills maps and rubrics with community input.    
• Landscape analysis and industry research: Supporting organizations in understanding the current opportunities and challenges within the industry to enable a data-driven conversation.   
• Open Facilitation Strategies:  running in-person and online events to host fractal conversations, engage community, and gather insights. You can sample these techniques by coming to one of our Oblique Thinking Hours. Participation can result in: 
  • Deeper understanding across disciplines/fields/community subgroups 
  • Materials, data, and research 
  • Conversations about decision-making process and structure  
• Community engagement research:  including surveys, interviews, user experience research and analysis. 
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) research:  
  • Evaluating diversity in communities.
  • Bringing community voices into the DEI conversation. 

Examples of our work

Community reports

• Astropy Community Engagement Report
• Astropy Community Views on DEI Report 
• Voices of Jupyter Report (Forthcoming) 
• Best Practices for Managing Turnover in Data Science Groups, Teams, and Labs
• Governance of Open Source Software Projects

Synthesis

• Leadership in Open Source
• Landscape of Scientific Open Source
• Data Science Skills

Facilitation for Open Communities

• Community-building: Oblique Thinking Hour blog posts 
  • Futures
  • Biomimicry
  • Group Concept Mapping
• Community knowledge exchange
  • CZI Community Call Outputs 

Community Retrospectives, Forward-planning, and Prioritization 

• MolSSI
• Software Carpentry - Value of Software Carpentry to Instructors Report
• Jupyter / Turing Way

Techniques

• Impact Assessment
• Skills Mapping - Developing rubrics for different open science roles, such as data science
• Fractal Conversations
• Futures Activities
• SWOT
• Iterative / Team Business Model Canvasing

Relevant Blog Posts - 

• Learning Organizations
• Deepening Organizational Expertise
• Learning from the Front Line

Academic publications and talks

• Ten Simple Rules for Helping Newcomers Become Contributors to Open Projects
• "Invisible Work" as a Lens for Understanding Humanware's Role in Research Cloud Computing: Evidence from an interview-based study
• Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals
• Challenges of Doing Data-Intensive Research in Teams, Labs, and Groups
• Resistance to Adoption of Best Practices in Science Teams
• Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software Is Developed and Sustained
• Using Peer Review to Support Development of Community Resources for Research Data Management