OBIS Capacity Development Task Team (CD-TT)

Chair: Carolina Peralta (Caribbean OBIS)

OBIS-TrainingTT Membership.

The OBIS Capacity Development Task Team (CD-TT) was established at the 2nd OBIS Steering group meeting in 2012, and was initially called the OBIS Documentation and Training Task Team. The CD-TT is mainly responsible for the OBIS Manual and the organization of training courses (see list of meetings below).

Terms of Reference of the CD-TT

• To provide training, guidelines and best practices for OBIS node managers in order to ensure a timely delivery of the best available quality datasets to OBIS.
• To provide training to scientists to access and correctly interpret data from OBIS for scientific analysis to support spatial and resource management and policy making.

Resources

See more information on our training resources here.

Background

Capacity building is an essential tenet of IOC’s mission. It enables all Member States to participate in and benefit from ocean research and services that are vital to sustainable development and human welfare on the planet (see IOC Capacity Development Strategy 2015-2021 was adopted by the 28th Session of the IOC Assembly (2015) through Resolution XXVIII-2 (version EN-FR or version ES-RU).

This strategic framework provides six outputs and numerous activities which call for investing in people and the institutions of which they are a part, enhancing access to scientific tools and methodologies, reinforcing IOC’s capabilities to provide services to Member States, enhancing the communication between scientific and policy makers communities, expanding ocean literacy in civil society and mobilising resources to accomplish these goals.

The OBIS Capacity Development activities focus on developing human resources through continuous professional development. With support from IOC’s OceanTeacher Global Academy (OTGA) and its regional training centres, OBIS is organising training courses and workshops, and is sharing all the training material through the OceanTeacher e-learning platform. The OBIS secretariat is also open for internships. Improving gender balance in ocean research is important to us, so OBIS strongly encourage the participation of women in our activities.

OBIS training action plan 2017-2021 (under review)

The OBIS training action plan 2017-2021 distinguishes training needs according to different target groups: (i) OBIS node data managers, (ii) OBIS trainers (train-the-trainers), (iii) data providers, (iv) scientists, (v) Academia (students and professors) and (vi) professionals at agencies and regional organisations. The current priority groups are the OBIS nodes and OBIS trainers. The OBIS node trainings can be further split into a full training (basic + advance) for new/candidate OBIS nodes and an advanced training for existing OBIS nodes (which could be done through webinars).

The OBIS training action plan calls for:

• Continuous updating of the OBIS Manual.
• Creation of lessons - “step-by-step” tutorials - on OceanTeacher
• Creation of short tutorial videos on different relevant topics
• Organisation of 2-hour webinars for more experienced node data managers
• Follow-up on the trainee performance after the training courses

Summary table of all proposed trainings topics per target group

	New Node data managers	Experienced Node data managers	OBIS trainers	Regular data providers	Scientists	Professors/Teachers	Organisations
intro to OBIS	high		high	high	high	high	high
basic data management			medium	high	high	high
data processing (QC, standards)	high		high	high		high
data publication	high		high	high
data output	medium		high	medium	high	high	high
data analysis and visualisation	medium		high	medium	high	high	high
social aspects and communication	high		high
special issues	high	high	high
new developments	high	high	high
OceanTeacher guidelines			high
training skills			high
PRIORITY	very high	very high	high	average	average	average-low	average-low
funding	IOC, IODE, OTGA	IOC, IODE, OTGA	IOC, IODE, OTGA	national/OTGA/projects	?	?	?
organized by	iOBIS	iOBIS	iOBIS	OBIS nodes	?	?	?
type	classroom	webinar	classroom + webinar	classroom	online/video tutorials	online/video tutorials	workshops