Grant Collaboration

“Ideas don’t come out fully formed , they only become clearer as you work on them . You just have to get started.” - Mark Zuckerberg

Grant Journey Entry #1- Preparation continues I said in the email, that we have written our 1-2 page descriptions and reached out to the program officers. This is true. We have created a page on Open Science Framework for easier collaboration and privacy. This is is alo true. I also said we have put down our experimental rationale, specific aims and our reason for the grant in writing and that is partially true. I should have said; We have a DRAFT of those things. After speaking to the program officers, we will know for certain what is staying and what wil be on the cutting floor. However, no writing is ever wasted. This is the beauty of working from a Mother Lode document. Our ideas can still reside somewhere even if they don't fit in this particular grant at this time. We at the Hub are also fans of Open Science and the Open Science Framework is a great place for a paper or grant collaboration. A screen shot of one of my projects is below. For these three grants, I will recommend that we all create an OSF project which will contain folders for the necessary components. One folder will contain links to the Draft Narrative Google Doc and another for the Draft Budget (Google) spreadsheet with justification. We will work on the budget spreadsheets as we write the Research Plan...but I'm getting ahead of myself. We are still in the Preparation stage. I recommend Zotero for all of the references. The Hub has a Group page, so all of our references on STEM education can be found there. The citations often contain the pdf's and curated notes to make it much easier to share and update our knowledge base from the literature. The link to that will be readily accessible on our OSF Wiki page also.

One of the best features of OSF is the ability to write about the writing process on a shared Wiki. To be clear, the Wiki is NOT the grant document. The Wiki records our conversation about the document and any other comments we wish to share about writing together. In addition, it provides a time stamp for when we were engaged on the document. So, there's an accountability aspect as well. The Wiki is the place to keep important information about the project organized in one place. So, in addition to the Zotero link, we will also have the link to the Proposal Guide, In fact, after we confirm the funding mechanism, all of the requirements for the 15-page narrative will go on the Wiki in BIG BOLD LETTERING. No time for mission creep here!. Finally, we will place a link to the shared Google Calendar on the Wiki which will contain the self-imposed and actual deadlines leading to our October (actually late September) submissions.

If you aren't familiar with OSF, check it out. All you need is your ORCID # to get started.

So go ahead...get started!