Onboarding Mentors

Welcome to the team!

As we onboard our second year of folks to grow our cross-DAAC NASA Mentors community, we will be documenting the onboarding process here. We expect Mentors to have different experiences, expertise, technical skills, and job responsibilities. Goals of onboarding will be:

  • get to know each other
  • share previous work by NASA Mentors
  • identify common needs and priorities
  • strengthen technical skills
  • strengthen teaching skills
  • build habits and confidence contributing to common materials
  • meet Champions and other researchers to better design how we support them

We will meet completely remotely, and primarily through Cohort Calls and Co-working sessions, and we’ll lead events like Hackathons, Workshops, and Champions Cohorts, which are all described in the approach-guide.

Mentor schedule

See our schedule of events at https://nasa-openscapes.github.io/mentors

Tooling

The tooling we use to collaborate include the following. We don’t expect everyone to have the same level of skills across all software. We will hold skill-building clinics to help strengthen familiarity and confidence, with the goal that everyone is able to contribute through overlapping and interoperable skills.

  • JupyterHub with 2i2c
    • JupyterLab and RStudio IDE (Matlab coming soon)
  • Notebooks, Coding
    • Jupyter, RMarkdown, Quarto; Python, R, Matlab
  • Terminal/shell
  • GitHub: forking, cloning, pulling, committing, pushing
  • GitHub Issues, project boards, code review
  • Slack

Openscapes Slack

Channels to join:

  • nasa-mentors (private)
  • 2022-nasa-champions (private)
  • #cloud-infrastructure

Mentors Google Drive

We have a shared Google Drive folder: NASA-OpenscapesMentors [ nasa-mentors ]. We’ll add you with edit privileges. There is a README file within it that orients you to the folders within. The convention is that within the [ brackets ] is who has permission within the folder.

Mentors GitHub Organization

We’ll add you to our NASA-Openscapes GitHub Organization.

Background

NASA Openscapes is a cross-DAAC mentor community creating & teaching resources to help researchers migrate workflows to the cloud. We meet and learn together, working with alignment on common needs for researchers using NASA Earthdata. Mentors receive Carpentries Instructor training and Openscapes mentorship to help you refine teaching strategies for Cloud, while collaborating on cloud tutorials to reuse rather than reinventing separately.

Together, we will teach and support in opportunities of different types: Hackathons, Workshops, and the Openscapes Champions program. We expect a range of technical ability and teaching experience. Through these growth opportunities within a broader community engagement approach, you will also gain visibility for your work as well as for your DAACs. The expected time commitment is 3-4 days/month per year. This accounts for a minimum of 4 hours/month of synchronous calls with the rest of the time being self-directed towards improving support approaches for your specific DAAC.