Collaboration and conflict management 101

Our Dimensions of Biodiversity team held a meeting at the Lake Baikal Bolshie Koty field station this summer to discuss teamwork and conflict management. We used a lot of the materials that were shared with us by Pat Soranno and her CSI-Limnology team. So for this Roundtable discussion, I’ll tell you about the materials we used, and policy documents that we are using to manage issues around data sharing, collaboration, and co-authorship…

If you want to check out some reading materials that might be useful, shoot me an email.

Update after our discussion…

1) I agree very much with several of Stacy‘s points about the Kilman conflict instrument – a) it seems very focused on American culture, and b) the structure of and word choice in the survey tends to put positive emphasis on extroversion and quick reaction.

2) Here’s the link to the post about creating a “resentment list” during field work – good for a laugh and also for easing tensions that build in close quarters.

3) Here’s the paper that John Parker and I wrote about working group dynamics – there’s a box where we set out some of the important points about running a working group.

Steve came into my office today while I was trying to fill out my reimbursement forms from the Russian travel this summer – he looked at my desk and commented on this particular side of international collaboration! 🙂

 

Big Data and the Future for Ecology

Great to see such a nice turnout for the Roundtable discussion on big data and ecology! I’m posting a slide set from the talk (ESA_Hampton_2012_public), but as you probably noticed, I don’t put much text on my slides, so it probably won’t make much sense to you if you didn’t see the talk! Feel free to email me if you want any details not included here. We are revising a paper on this topic for resubmission to Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Frontiers has a  liberal policy on copyright so – if accepted – please rest assured that I and the other authors will make it available on our websites.

I took out the cute xkcd images, but you can enjoy as many as you like by checking out xkcd.com yourself!

What?! You’re still reading this post after checking out xkcd.com? I doubt it, but if you are, then…

Here’s some papers I mentioned:

Some Simple Guidelines for Effective Data Management
Elizabeth T. Borer et al.
Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 90(2) 205-214

Heidorn, P. B. 2008. Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science. Library Trends 57:280–299.

Aronova, E., K. S. Baker, and N. Oreskes. 2010. Big Science and Big Data in Biology: From the International Geophysical Year through the International Biological Program to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, 1957–Present. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40:183–224.

Shaun shared a blog post that describes the 3 V’s of ‘big data’ – volume, velocity, and variety.