Size and scope of Virtual Cohorts

[MattF-NSIDC]

Hello TOPS team,

I'm trying to understand if my proposal idea meets the criteria for a Virtual Cohort as outlined in section 3.2 of the F.14 solicitation document. What is the expected size and scope of a virtual cohort? From this text:

The selectee(s) has flexibility in organizing activities, but it is expected that all five modules will be taught to virtual cohorts throughout the year

...it's not 100% clear to me whether each cohort is expected to teach all five modules, or if there's room for a large "cohort" that specializes in supporting learning of a difficult concept that's relevant throughout the curriculum.

I've been reviewing the OpenCore modules (e.g. OC3) and outlines and to my mind, version control and open-source hosting services (e.g. GitHub) are a key concept/skill underlying multiple modules (most notably OC1 Ethos Lesson 5, OC2 Open Data in general, OC3 Open Software in general, OC4 Open Results Lesson 2, OC5 Tools Lesson 4). Version control is only a small part of OC3 Lesson 5, and I feel a longer time investment is often required to become functional with version control and open-source ecosystem concepts.

Is a Virtual Cohort specialized in providing deep teaching support for using Git, GitHub, version-controllable rich text technologies for authoring documentation and manuscripts, documentation-generation technologies, and Continuous Integration/Deployment technologies a reasonable proposal? Or is it expected that all Virtual Cohorts follow the full curriculum? If the latter, I'm still interested in other ways to contribute TOPS supporting those skills and would be interested in input.

Thanks for your time!

Matt Fisher @ NSIDC

[cgentemann]

Matt,
Sorry for the delay answering. The Virtual Cohorts are to help individual earn their TOPS open science certification. We want 20,000 scientists to have the core open science skills that will be taught in OpenCore. A longer time investment and advanced topics would be more applicable to topic 1) open core extensions. The virtual cohorts are focused on open core.
Thank you,
Chelle

[MattF-NSIDC]

@cgentemann Thanks for your response. Could you provide more context on "Open Core extensions" ? I am struggling to find information online or in the solicitation.