NB this post contains some swear words.

On May 10-11, thirty some odd members of the CosmoQuest team met in St Louis. For many, this was the first time we came together as a team, and I have to admit, not even I knew everyone as that first morning started.

In order to get such a large team working together efficiently, we needed to build community around shared values and shared goals. To get things off to a solid start, I put together this slide deck, which I now want to share with you, just as I shared it with the team in St Louis.

(NB: you can see the original talk, terrible quality and all, on YouTube.)

On May 5, 2015, we submitted our proposal to NASA. This more than 70 page document was the result of this team coming together in what sometimes felt like a heroic effort.

Everyone contributed, but I’d like to call out a few people who went above and beyond. Toshi Komatsu did great work defining our Projected Science program, and helping proof-read and edit numerous other sections. Sanlyn Buxner did an amazing job helping edit things for length. Given the 40 page limit, I don’t think any of us thought we’d have to worry about going over, but – we went over by a lot, and it was Sanlyn who did the needed cutting. Finally, to be entirely honest, this grant wouldn’t have been completed if it wasn’t for Jake Noel-Storr. During those last few days, he and I literally took turns writing and sleeping, swapping the document back and forth, as we pulled it all together.

Through the summer and fall we waited for word, and on September 25 we finally heard: We’d been funded.

Getting to this day wasn’t easy. CosmoQuest was initially funded through two separate ROSES EPOESS grants that should have gone up for renewal in 2012 and 2014. When the ROSES grant call was cancelled, we had to learn how to stretch every dollar and every minute of paid effort. Sequestration and the reorganization of NASA mission EPO funds led to additional funding cuts we had to find ways to survive.

We felt CosmoQuest was something worth fighting for, and starting in 2012, we began hosting Hangoutathons – 36 hour online fundraisers – and many of the people at this meeting appeared in those fundraising marathons and helped us raise the money we needed to survive.

In 2014, as part of the Hangoutathon, Timothy LeGower donated Dragon Eggs that we could give to the largest donor. That year, the recipient was Richard Hayward. At the end of the year, Richard sent them back to us in an amazing chest, and he began a tradition of passing the eggs. This year, our Dragon eggs would have been passed to Silvan Wespie and the Weekly Space Hangout Team, but they asked instead that we hold onto the eggs for the year, and because of that, I’m able to share this tradition with you today.

In addition to the dragon eggs, we also have a tradition of squirrels. I’ve always been a fan of what Camilla the Chicken was able to do as a science communicator. When we started CosmoQuest, I wanted us to have our own spokes critter, so I got some squirrels on Amazon. In January 2014, while manning a booth at Pensacon in Florida, I got terribly sick, and just didn’t have it in. Me to talk with people. What we did instead was put little signs in the paws of all our squirrels, allowing them to tell people how to interact with the booth. It turned out, people preferred to interact with the squirrels! And it turned out, me and my 103 degree fever were totally ok with that 🙂 Ever since Pensacon, Captain Chuck McFluffybutt and his science communicating siblings have been our “booth spokes squirrels,” and have helped us serve up science.

As we welcome all the new teams to CosmoQuest, we have squirrels for all the locations.

Now, as we all gather at the Moonrise Hotel in St Louis, we get to start to build new traditions.

Growing up, I read Frank Herbert’s “Dune” an inordinate number of times. The opening sentence has always meant a lot to me: “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” As we start this new book in CosmoQuest’s history, I want to take a moment and make sure we are building on a strong foundation of shared values, and shared rules of collaboration.

When we formed CosmoQuest, we started with a very simple value statement:

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a global community to raise our understanding of the Universe. We are citizen scientists. We are professional scientists. We are educators. We are programmers. We each provide different skills & resources to this community. Together we strive to explore our Universe & contribute to science. Together we are CosmoQuest.

Looking at the people in this meeting, I see a room of people who each bring different skills to the table. In order to be successful, we need all of you, and all the varied talents that you possess. In this meeting, we have the professional scientists, the educators, and the programmers. We have communicators and evaluators. We have people who do citizen science. All of us are necessary to succeed, and only by working together can we grow CosmoQuest to its greatest potential.

The Rules

Rule 1… and 5… and 7: No assholes

When we set out to write our proposal, we started with a few simple rules which I posted up on our project wiki. The first rule is, “No assholes.”

Someone, or several someones, edited the rules to make rule 1, and rule 5, … and rule 7(!) be “No assholes.”

If you are in this room, this means you are not an asshole.

This also means that when you get into an argument with someone in this room, as you both struggle and fight over how to build CosmoQuest in the best way possible, you need to remember that the person your arguing with, who in that moment you may wish death upon, is not an asshole. They, like you, are simply trying to do the best things possible.

And… speaking of death…

Rule 2: No Death

This rule has two parts. On one hand, please don’t die. On the other hand, no murder. Remember, we can’t use grant funds on bail!

All joking aside, this rule is also a reminder of those we’ve lost. CosmoQuest has already lost two dear collaborators: Michael Gibbs, who was part of building our Educators’ Zone, and PG Holyfield, who dreamed of writing a planetarium show with us, but died days before we found out the grant was funded. Michael and PG will always be part of CosmoQuest, and I always remember them when I say, “No death” out loud, and “No more death” in my head.

Rule 3: Do not lick the science

There are a lot of geologists in this group.

When you google licking science, links about geologists licking rocks come back.

Folks – don’t lick the science here. Please? Just… don’t.

“Don’t lick the science” is also a euphemism to be good to each other.

Sarah Tuttle made this amazing graphic that really summarizes what I mean. This is a collaboration where all are welcome, and where we recognize that everyone has value and has something to contribute. 

Here we judge people by what they bring to the community, and not on sex, gender, race or anything else.

And we are going to fail now and then. This isn’t manned space flight – failure is an option. Like Mars Curiosity, we embrace the theme, “Dare mighty things.” As we strive to push ourselves to create what is good, and as we do what is hard, we will sometimes fail, and that is ok as long as we learn from our failures. There’s going to be tears.

And there will also be laughter, and joy, a more tears (but of happiness).

Be good to one another – don’t lick the science. Let’s create a safe place where people – all people – can fail, and learn, and succeed more than we ever imagined.

Rule 4: Trello or it didn’t happen

We aren’t elephants. We do forget. We are doing so many different things that it’s easy to forget a simple, “Hey, can you?”

Let’s avoid all the “But I asked you to?” accusations, and simply live be the rule: If a task doesn’t get written in Trello, it won’t happen.

NB. Rule 5 is where this group started editing things … Rule 5, like rule 1 and rule 7, is “No assholes.”

Rule 6: There is no rule 6

And Rule 6… is that there is no rule 6.

There are lots of places in our project that still aren’t defined and are intentionally left blank as places we can and will grow into over time.

Rule 6 celebrates those blank spaces we will someday fill.

Rule 8: Don’t fight a land war in Asia.

I’m just going to let Eddie Izzard explain this one [youtube link].

There are lots of times we’re all going to be tempted to say, “Hey, that things those other people did that spectacularly failed? I’m going to do that exact thing, but I have a better plan!” Don’t be like Hitler; don’t fight a land war in Asia. Learn from others. It’s ok to fail, but let’s find entirely new and interesting ways to fail.

Rule 9: When you go out into the world, take a friend and stick together (and share your docs in the cloud).

Otters sleep with their hands together so that they don’t drift apart. We need to digital hold ourselves together so that our efforts don’t drift apart.

We are a collaboration. None of us are alone. Work together, and use the technologies that allow you to most effectively collaborate online. We’re going to spend some time talking about a technique called mobbing, and how we can effectively use Google Docs and other online tools in combination with Zoom to build things together.

Rule 10: Google Site or it didn’t happen.

And as we work on documents on the cloud and do things in the real world, remember to link things into, and document them onto the Google site. We have a whole lot of moving pieces and it is super easy to forget things and lose things. Let’s not do that! When you do something new or update something old, take a moment and document it.

Ok… for now that’s all we have for rules, but before I hand over the stage to our facilitators, I want to do one more thing. When I attended the Agile Games conference in Boston in 2014, they started the conference off with a review of values for the conference.

PS…

As we move forward, I’m going to be making cards that describe both our phases of collaboration, and our values (which are from the Agile Community).

(Our values are described in this blog post with citations.)

Be focused in what you do, working as best you can to carve out time to put CosmoQuest front and center as you work.

Be courageous. As we work together, know that you have a safety net to stretch ourselves and take on greater challenges, and to move beyond what is safe to what is most right for the project.

We are open, expressing our needs and concerns as we work, so that our collaboration can be supportive.

NASA has put a great deal of trust in us, and with the cooperative agreement that brought us together. We have a project where we said up front that we will adjust things as technologies change and as science needs arise. Because we have great control over our destiny, we are committed to success.

And as we work together, as we focus and dare mighty things, we will come together from a point of respect. Remember rules 1, 5, and 7: No assholes. You were each chosen to be here because you have skills this collaboration needs. I respect each of you. Right now, not all of you know each other, and I ask that we move forward sharing successes and failures as we help each other become worthy of one another respect.

This is who we are. This is what we do. And together we are CosmoQuest.