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This paper describes an approach for creating a virtual community for peer mentoring and provides insight, in the form of best practices, on how engineering faculty can elicit support through cross-institutional mentoring. The value of a virtual, peer-mentoring community is providing support that may be otherwise unavailable at one’s institution; it can also minimize negative impacts that may be associated with institutional power dynamics. The best practices described herein are informed by six early-career engineering education faculty that developed and participated in a virtual community of practice over the last two years. We will describe best practices for identifying a shared vision, developing possible tangible outcomes, writing operating procedures, selecting an appropriate platform for communication, and facilitating reflection and changes to practice.
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An ocean practices maturity model: from good to best practices
Ocean practices, intended as a wide spectrum of methodologies supporting ocean-related research, operations, and applications, are constantly developed and improved to enable informed decision-making. Practices start from the idea of an individual or a group and often evolve towards what can be called good or best practices. This bottom-up approach may in principle result in different paths for the evolution of each practice, and ultimately generate situations where it is not clear to a new user how to compare two practices aiming at the same objective, and determine which one is best. Also, although a best practice is supposed to be the result of a multi-institutional collaborative effort based on the principles of evidence, repeatability and comparability, a set of individual requirements is not yet defined in literature for a practice to be considered a good, better, and ultimately a best practice. This paper proposes a method for addressing those questions and presents a new maturity model for ocean practices, built upon existing maturity models for systems and software, developed and adopted in the last decades. The model provides attributes for assessing both the maturity of the practice description and its implementation. It also provides a framework for analyzing gaps and suggesting actions for practice evolution. The model has been tested against a series of widely adopted practices and the results are reported and discussed. This work facilitates a common approach for developing and assessing practices, from which greater interoperability and trust can be achieved.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1728913
- PAR ID:
- 10624946
- Editor(s):
- NA
- Publisher / Repository:
- NA
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Marine Science
- Volume:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2296-7745
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Ocean Best Practices, ocean observing
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This perspective outlines how authors of ocean methods, guides, and standards can harmonize their work across the scientific community. We reflect on how documentation practices can be linked to modern information technologies to improve discoverability, interlinkages, and thus the evolution of distributed methods into common best practices within the ocean community. To show how our perspectives can be turned into action, we link them to guidance on using the IOC-UNESCO Ocean Best Practice System to support increased collaboration and reproducibility during and beyond the UN Decade of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development.more » « less
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NA (Ed.)Over the past decade, the Ocean Best Practices System, hosted and maintained by the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, has grown to become a trusted and stable repository for all types of ocean Best Practices documentation. Given the nature of the information it contains, the repository embodies a unique resource base for supporting initiatives aimed at strengthening standardization in Ocean Science. Based on this consideration, the Ocean Best Practices System is forming a new task team to explore and evaluate the potential role that the comprehensive Best Practice information it secures could play in identifying and prioritizing processes for furthering this objective. Particular care is being taken to keep the work open and transparent through constant community engagement and by linking with international bodies/organizations dealing with measurement.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2024.1415374
