Thanks for your interest in the Webinar “Improving the Effectiveness of Team Science”. The recording can be found at https://breezio.com/webinars.html.
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Karen McCord and I am thrilled to join Breezio as CEO at such an exciting time. I’ve spent my career thus far fostering science teams and bring to Breezio a passion to make science collaboration a successful endeavor. A short bio is below.
As Shahab Kaviani mentioned in the Improving the Effectiveness of Team Science Webinar, we are sharing some of the questions asked but where time did not allow for an answer. We encourage the community interested in Team Science to engage in the dialogue as well by completing this 2 question survey.
Question 1: “Is there a good primer or annotated bibliography on how to lead – e.g. how often to meet and how to best organize meetings? How to facilitate the Fun of collaboration.”
You will find in the Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science report an extensive bibliography and Chapter 6 of the report specifically speaks to Leadership of Science Teams. The Team Science Toolkit was mentioned during the conference as well. Finally, one of our participants offered this resource from USGS as a place to find tools for facilitation of teams.
As for the Fun, a simple ice-breaker (sharing a unique fact about oneself, for instance) during the Kick-off Team Meeting can help team members get to know one another. Importantly, take the time to celebrate and have fun as a team when milestones for the project are accomplished.
Question 2: “What initial first steps should be taken at the beginning of the team coming together to make it a success?”
Often referred to during the Science of Team Science conference as the “prenuptial”, putting a team charter in place which outlines the Team’s shared understandings, expectations of each team member and rules of engagement will support success. There are numerous examples available online, you may find one called Team Charters here.