1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 PURPOSE OF COMMUNITY CHARTER

The Coastal Coupling Community of Practice (CC CoP) charter provides information about the organization for the benefit of its participants and the broader community in order to successfully launch, cultivate, and sustain the Community of Practice. The charter describes the background, mission, and goals of the CC CoP; benefits and responsibilities of its members; and the organization's governance and commitment to stakeholder engagement. The intended audience of this charter includes community leaders, community members and all interested stakeholders.

2. COMMUNITY OVERVIEW

A Community of Practice (CoP) represents a group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems and the common pursuit of solutions.  Communities of Practice are a way of developing social capital, nurturing new knowledge, stimulating innovation, and sharing knowledge.  Communities of practice knit people together with peers and their outputs can include leading practices, guidelines, knowledge repositories, technical problem and solution discussions, working papers, and strategies.

The CC CoP represents a group of people that are informally bound together through the common pursuit of coupling inland hydrologic and oceanic processes to advance our ability to simulate and analyze earth system processes in the coastal zone. The CC CoP will help move the scientific community through the value chain that allows for the transition of coastal coupling work from basic research to process research as it pertains to applications, and from development to operations.  The CC CoP aims to develop products and services for operational use that meet the needs of the end user community across a wide range of society-critical applications including forecasts, forensic studies, risk assessment, design, and system management (Luettich et al. 2013).

The purpose of this CC CoP includes:

• Advance predictive capabilities in the coastal zone by developing and implementing improved approaches for coupling models of inland hydrology and the ocean that advance the state of science and are responsive to stakeholder needs.
• Establishing an active, functioning, and sustainable community that continues to interact in order to develop, compare, improve, and apply coastal solutions.

3. JUSTIFICATION

Approximately 100 million people who live in coastal areas do not have access to accurate water quantity and quality forecasts. In the coastal zones, contemporary operational forecast models do not appropriately capture the complexity of combined freshwater, estuarine, and coastal processes. Scientists and modelers from the Federal, state, and local governments, academia, and the private sector will work together as a community to address these challenges.

By advancing coastal coupling efforts, the CC CoP is working toward the eventual goal of developing the products and services that society needs in order to provide actionable water information at local, regional, and national scales. Ultimately, the CC CoP will allow water professionals to collaboratively work toward the shared objective of protecting communities, economies, and ecosystems from critical water-related issues, such as flood, drought, and poor water quality. This work will help provide information to protect the lives and property of the 100 million people living in the coastal zone that currently do not have access to accurate water forecasts. It can also help to inform forward-thinking adaption planning in coastal regions to account for a changing climate and rising sea levels.

4. SCOPE

4.1 MISSION

The mission of the CC CoP is to enable:

• Coupling of models to better represent earth system processes across the coastal zone and provide improved predictions of quantities such as water levels, flow timing and duration, currents, sediment, water quality variables, geomorphic changes, etc.
• Actionable information on these quantities provided to stakeholders in timely, accessible and user-friendly formats.
• Accelerated national coverage of integrated water prediction capabilities through the adoption of community research and models that acknowledge stakeholder-driven requirements.

4.2 GOALS

The goals of the CC CoP are as follows:

• Create a sustainable framework and vision for engagement between Federal agencies, academia, state and local governments, and private industry around model and tool development.
• Develop and support coastal coupling modeling best practices.
• Work toward collaborative solutions for continental-scale integrated water prediction using a unified modeling approach.
• Advance science around modeling that will result in better products and services that meet the needs of the operational use community (e.g., natural and water resources managers, water suppliers, planners, decision-makers).
• Encourage the adoption of standards including definitions, metadata, data access, and transition of models to operations.
• Look for collaboration points with partners outside of coastal coupling modeling (e.g., data providers, end-users, social scientists) and align priorities in order to advance the state of the science.
• Identify unrecognized pockets of related projects and share work openly with those projects.
• Evaluate the success of the CoP on a regular basis.

5. COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

5.1 INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL BENEFITS

Through the sharing, creation, and management of knowledge around coastal coupling issues, the community enables individuals to

• Continue learning and developing professionally
• Access expertise
• Improve communication and transparency with peers
• Increase productivity and quality of work
• Network to keep current in the field
• Develop a sense of professional identity
• Enhance professional reputation

The community benefits the integrated water perspective by

• Reducing time/cost to retrieve information
• Reducing learning curves
• Improving knowledge sharing and distribution
• Making informed decision
• Enhancing coordination, standardization, and synergies across organizational units
• Reducing rework and reinvention
• Enabling innovation
• Benchmarking against influencing industry standards
• Building alliances

5.2 COMMUNITY NORMS

• Operate around the following governance principles: participation, transparency, responsiveness, equity and inclusiveness, effectiveness and efficiency, accountability, and community rules of engagement.
• Be open to all with an interest and who abide by community norms.
• Encourage the ongoing education of members and the deepening of expertise among members.

5.3 COMMUNITY RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

• Members contribute to the community through their personal experiences and skills by sharing challenges, lessons learned, and successes in an organized fashion that contributes to the atmosphere of problem-solving.
• The topics, discussions, and work done remain pertinent to the CC CoP scope.
• Members strive to create an environment of trust and respect by participating in insightful discussions of ideas and experiences and listen to each other with open and constructive minds.
• Members will not be afraid to respectfully challenge one another by asking questions but will refrain from personal attacks.
• Members advance their personal and professional goals through participation in the community.
• Members agree to be respectful and use appropriate language including clarifying ambiguous terms and acronyms in group discussions and to listen and respond to each other with open and constructive minds.
• Members commit to searching for opportunities for consensus or compromise and for creative solutions.
• Members will attempt to build on each member's strengths, and help each other improve areas in need of further development.

6. COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION

6.1 ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

This section describes the key roles supporting the community.

6.2 STAKEHOLDERS

A stakeholder is a person or organization that is actively involved in the community, and/or  can positively or negatively impact the achievement of the community’s objectives, and/or has interests that may be positively or negatively affected by execution or completion of the community’s goals.  It is important to acknowledge the importance of stakeholder attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge to help inform and garner public support for CC CoP efforts. The table below shows the stakeholder groups that are currently identified.

These stakeholders fall into two categories: those internal to the CC CoP and those outside the CC CoP. These two categories will be engaged in somewhat different fashions. Internal stakeholders will engage through annual in person meetings, larger conferences, webinars, the community website, and other types of communications. External stakeholders are not as accessible, but engagement can occur through direct interaction at stakeholder functions in the form of informal conversations and more formal presentations. The CC CoP will aim to create mechanisms that make it easier to engage with these external stakeholders.

Both internal and external stakeholders will benefit from a collaborative platform that allows for real time feedback. This helps inform the feedback loop between these different stakeholder groups and will add to the value chain of transition of work from research to operations and back to research, including development of products and services. Regardless of the method of engagement, stakeholders should be engaged continually through the work flow to maintain communication and ensure that the final products meet the stakeholders’ needs.

7. REFERENCES

Luettich, R.A., L.D. Wright, R. Signell, C. Friedrichs, M. Freiedrichs, J. Harding, K. Fennel, E. Howelett, S. Graves, E. Smith, G. Crane, R. Baltes, (2013) Introduction to special section on The U.S. IOOS Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 118, 6319-6328.

NAO 216-105B: http://www.corporateservices.noaa.gov/ames/administrative_orders/chapter_216/216-105B.html