Session 1: Visioning for the community

In-person group

What is your vision for this community? What would constitute a successful community?

• grow the membership; become a strong voice for the community
• Trust and collaboration is lacking compared with other communities
• Big goal of community: Driven by the science questions. Not just modelling, but should be bigger and incorporate other parts of the cryosphere community
• better communication leads to improved science. e.g. sea level and ice sheet communities need each other for pathway to impact
• More transparency with a small community
• Bit more difficult for cryo community
• Small community
• Fewer obs
• Start with something small that we can deliver, but aim high in the long term
• Small: more detailed understanding of the interactions between different systems: ice sheet, sea ice, ocean, solid-Earth. Start with process-based studies of the individual interactions/feedbacks
• First and foremost work together
• We tend to come from different sides: atm, geology, engineering. Flavour of community is very wide and can lead to compartmentalisation. If have divides, then can lead to fracturing and separation between the different communities .We can avoid this because we’re small and are somewhat forced to work together
• Need to develop structure that allows us to operate freely and flexibly in ways that are interactive, 2-way flow of information. Info at one scale flows easily to the other
• Regular workshops, regular communication, opportunity to brainstorm across the different groups
• Investment by ACCESS-NRI is win-win, putting focus on the community. But in a way that not just half of the community benefits, but the whole community. Need to make sure that if there’s increased focussed on ice sheet modelling, need support for that in terms of funding, hires, etc.
• Need more communication between groups
• Discussed climate and ice sheet model coupling. But need to ensure have literacy on all the systems that impact ice sheet and vice versa
• We want to avoid fractures and infighting. We can be much more effective (research, education) and have great impact (e.g. to policy) if we work together and build trust and collaboration. COSIMA has done a great job of modelling this.
• Student training is a priority
• Workshops, sharing ideas, training, mentorship
• Mentorship & training — promote this culture
• Formal and informal training sessions, run by students, github and code sharing, how-to analyse and process data
• Give credit
• Give awards: selfless contributor award. So promoting people who do good to build the community
• Strong support from developers and senior staff. E.g. Steve Griffies is there almost every week and provides direct input to students
• Treat each other very well
• Means that what they’re doing is top in the world
• Want international people to join our conversation
• The way ACCESS-NRI is managed is very community-focussed
• COSMIA linkage worked very well. Enabled hiring of people dedicated to growing the community and doing great science
• Not just saying “we want this”, but actually making things happen
• We need dedicated person and resources to do this
• Good leadership is key
• What is targeted is really important
• Tools
• ECR feedback

What guiding principles should we abide by (e.g. see COSIMA Code of Ethics)?

• COSIMA: integrity, trust, collaboration, clarity, fairness
• Our values:
• Openness
• Need a balance of points of view and no-one dominates
• Uplifting ECR voice; encouraging ECRs to share their thoughts. Students benefit from community and training, but then important to feedback to community. E.g. if student develops something, encourage to share their contributions to grow the community
• Need to feel safe to share. E.g. COSIMA was encouraged to share unpublished results, but need to know that your idea will be safe. What’s the best way to make people know that sharing will be safe to share? Requires attribution.
• Also need to consider the big picture/vision and what the cryosphere community is working towards (so do still need the more senior voice to be heard!)
• Everytime we write a paper that’s in the community, cite the Code of Ethics — keep it first and foremost in our minds and remind others
• pathway/process to deal with situations if something arises
• Takes buy in from the group
• Leader of this group needs to take a significant role
• When someone new joins, talk to them about code of ethics
• If there’s a breach of Code, then need a dispute resolution process
• Need to appropriately credit contributions
• Using github enables this because there’s a clear record of contributions
• SOOS symposium opened questions to ECRs first, then the more senior voices
• Helps to create culture of ECR contribution
• Then it becomes natural for ECRs to speak
• Fostering culture that’s not lecture approach (someone lectures, someone listens) or correction mentality
• If want good feedback, uplift voices, rather than correct
• Shared toolboxes, like Chad Greene has provided, enables post-processing of outputs. Requires openness and trust that you’ll be appropriately credited
• When providing feedback, be constructive so that we know how we need to improve. E.g. at the end of a review, say “here are 3 things I really loved about this paper”
• Helping the community; being generous with our time. And then ensuring that that’s acknowledged.
• E.g. for contributions that are not typically taken into account (e.g. University metrics), be really clear to push that person’s contributions So that the community (and even that person’s superiors!) see their contributions
• Need to reach out to those who are not necessarily involved in this community, but whose contributions are instrumental, related, and essential for our work
• need to avoid any exclusion. Want to involve others in our success
• Need to think about structure. This is the cryosphere modelling community, and we need to be clear on that so that we’re not unintentionally exclude others. Then we need a structure above this group so that all can be a part of it
• We care about our neighbours. We’re so small that we need to keep good relationships

What tools would you like to see made available/developed (e.g. CMIP data output analysis notebooks; workflows for ice sheet initialisation)? What would you be prepared to contribute?

• CMIP output analysis notebooks
• Need to ensure that we follow standards (format, variable names)
• Can rely on collaboration with ISMIP6 community and what other NRI WGs have already contributed
• Tools for visualisation
• Very powerful for communicating research (other groups, media, public), but not necessarily have a lot of time
• Can benefit from visualisation team at NRI
• Data sharing
• E.g. high resolution pan-Antarctic simulations can provide BCs for ice sheet model. Other way is that ice sheet modelling outputs can provide BCs for COSIMA community
• Have knowledge-growing/training sessions
• E.g. ice sheet model initialisation - bringing in international experts
• Share data pool for ice sheet model initialisation
• Put all our datasets on NCI
• Need workflows so that the original data can be subset/formatted appropriately for ice sheet model parameterisation
• Data is maintained with good metadata and citable DOI
• Geophysics data
• Some is available already at NCI - Rebecca Farrington could come to one of our meetings and talk about data strategy
• BoM
• High resolution atm modelling and reanalysis over Antarctica
• Part of BARRA-BARPA

Other points

• Need to ensure keep regional modelling as a priority
• Consideration about how to bring along regional modellers. Definitely don’t want to exclude them
• Important for our community to ensure large-scale and regional modelling are interactive, feed into one another, and ensure that improvements in each are two-way. Be upfront and support both
• Structure
• Important here to think about structure. ACCESS modelling component is not the de-facto cryo modelling community, but broader. Involve geoscientists whose contributions feed into our community. We have opportunity to define this. We’re just a subset of the cryo community (i.e. we’re the cryo modelling community)
• ECR contribution
• Don’t want to lump time consuming chores to ECRs. Want specific mentoring/training framework around that. Coaching and feedback – constructive.
• If ECR takes tasks, then there’s concrete framework about support for that role
• ACCESS-Hive
• Kelsey to organise some time at future meeting to go through how to use it