A master class in building and understanding Communities of Practice
An uncommon event about creating communities in the liminal spaces between disciplines so we can raise our scientific discovery to the level our society needs now
On December 12, 2022 during the largest annual gathering of Earth and Space Scientists in the world we convened an event uncommon to the discussions that usually take place there: a conversation about our communities of science, specifically their capacity, inclusivity, and diversity.
We opened a big conversation, one we deliberately directed not to resolution but to maturation and community creation.
The ideas and the coordination for the event were the product of the entire NASA Center for HelioAnalytics as well as our interactions across scientific and data science communities.
We live in an age when the rate at which information is becoming more complex has started to drastically outpace the capacities of the scientist to analyze. At the same time, the imperative to make sense of the information is heightened given the civilizational needs from our science: human expansion into the solar system, global pandemics, climate crisis, etc.
We need a paradigm shift in how we do science. And one element common to all paradigm shifts is that they required and emerged from new communities being brought together.
There are countless examples we could point to, but one that I find moving is the Enlightenment era salons.
In the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe gatherings predominantly convened by women offered a forum for open, reflective, civil exchange. Justine Kolata describes the ideal salon participant as a person who was uniquely interesting and offered fresh ideas that were well communicated and advanced the conversation. He or she possessed an innate love of learning, exhibited a reflective intelligence, firmly held principled opinions but also demonstrated the utmost sensitivity and thoughtfulness towards others.”
It is important to pause and recognize that even in these new forums for inclusive exchange there were many groups historically excluded from the conversations, voices that have not been a part of decisions and telling the histories. Imperfect inclusivity is an unfortunate undeniable fact of gathering, one that requires a constant vigilance to, reflection about, and movement to redress. Indeed, it makes clear the community is a becoming, an ongoingness, and can never be a static thing.
But from the cultural innovation of the salons emerged ideas that carried the American and French revolutions and the Enlightenment in science itself.
What these salons did, and what the other cultural innovations that have led to new scientific paradigms, is, in the words of international peacebuilder and scholar John Paul Lederach, bring together an improbable set of voices and create a quality of relationship among people who don’t think alike.
For these reasons, salons and similar kinds of nontraditional, inclusive, transdisciplinary gatherings need to be a part of our upbringing and cultivation in science and engineering.
We need similar innovation to respond to the new age of information. Science requires communities that facilitate the use of machine learning, knowledge capture, and data analytics to expand the discovery potential for key research topics and missions.
For scientific communities to embrace and robustly and responsibly practice data science, including Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML), they require transdisciplinary communities of practice.
The needs for transdisciplinarity are both technological and social:
In service of the flourishing of scientific discovery: We need to know how to robustly and responsibly practice data science, including AI/ML, tools that are inextricable from the scientific process when studying complex problems. These tools can help establish interconnections between domains and between different ways of knowing;
In service of the flourishing of community: There is a growing malaise among individuals and communities (acutely observable in the communities of scientists and engineers in the Earth and Space Sciences), linked to a lack of connection, diversity, inclusivity, and a general feeling of fatigue (McGranaghan et al., 2020). In our communities, the ways we segment and separate ourselves deny richer interactions and relationality. We need to overcome disciplinary silos for the sake of the fulfillment of communities and their members.
These are the realizations that brought us together on December 12 and to the idea of a transdisciplinary community of practice. However, creating and cultivating such a community is non-trivial.
To start a nuanced conversation, one that could extend over long time, we gathered groups to share experiences and to help build a literacy of transdisciplinarity, but also to spark a learning community to explore and evolve how to create and sustain these communities of practice. We created this event out of a desire to learn from kindred communities exploring transdisciplinarity, especially in using data science robustly and responsibly.
The event consisted of a panel discussion led by pioneers and thought-leaders for creating communities of practice across science. Those remarkable individuals included:
Malvika Sharan: Senior Researcher for Open Research at The Turing Way at The Alan Turing Institute and Co-Director of Open Life Science;
Lou Woodley: Bridger of people, science, and technology, championing both human and technical infrastructure within science. Founder and Director of the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement;
Rebecca Koskela: Executive Director of Research Data Alliance US
Susan Shingledecker: Executive Director of the Earth Science Informatics Partners;
Chelle Gentemann: Advocate for open science, open source software, and inclusivity. Leader of NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission and the 2023 Year of Open Science; and
(introduction to the Center for HelioAnalytics) Barbara Thompson: Data and open science visionary and pioneering NASA Heliophysicist.
So, this is a conversation for any individual or group trying to connect across disciplinary lines and to use data and open science for scientific discovery.
Emergent from the conversation were animating and sustaining questions:
Acknowledging that open science and data science mean different things to different people and groups and contexts, What is your definition of open science?
How do we understand whether a community is flourishing and the impact community managers/facilitation/groups have on a community?
How can we support longer-term engagement strategies across our communities generative of the flourishing of each of them and the flourishing of science?
What are the literacies needed by scientific communities to build community? What is the new education?
The animating purpose of this session was to facilitate the growth of the broader community of practice for data and open science in the Earth and Space Sciences.
You can learn about the ongoing discussion and join it here.