StraboSpot Workshops and Community Engagement During Covid

StraboSpot (StraboSpot.org) is a digital data system for collection, management and sharing of geologic data from the macro- to the microscale. Due to the pandemic, it was not possible to organize field-based workshops and fieldtrips in Summer 2020 for demonstrating and eliciting community feedback on the StraboSpot data system. Rather, we decided to run a series of week-long virtual workshops to familiarize practioners with the StraboSpot data system. Workshops were organized by discipline (sedimentology, structural geology, and petrology), each with approximately 100 participants, including U.S.-based and foreign scientists. The daily structure of the workshop was a 2-3 hour block with presentations from several StraboSpot team members, followed by an afternoon help desk. We reassigned participant support costs (originally intended for field-based meetings) to provide a small ($200-250) stipend to U.S.-based participants if they agreed to fully input a data set into StraboSpot and make it publicly available. This approach to increasing engagement – which was not part of original dissemination plan – was extremely successful. Workshop participants who signed up for the stipend were generally very engaged in the data system, provided important feedback on the design and vocabulary, and are highly likely to use StraboSpot in the future. Further, it helped to populate the database. People who received the stipend also presented their StraboSpot projects to the larger group on the last day of the workshop, often with an impressive data set. Because of Covid restrictions on fieldwork in summer 2021, we intend to continue providing stipends for young professionals (graduate students, post-doctoral fellows) to use the StraboSpot system for their thesis or project-based fieldwork. In addition to getting detailed feedback, we hope these testers will become a cohort of motivated users that will teach and encourage others to use the StraboSpot data system.