Questionnaire and Small Group Discussion for National Science Foundation (NSF) Water, Sustainability, and Climate (WSC) Program Grantees

To be read by each small group discussion facilitator:
My name is [DISCUSSION FACILITATOR] and I am a [POSITION TITLE] in the [OFFICE NAME]. I am
collaborating with the Water, Sustainability, and Climate (WSC) program to learn about WSC
project members’ perspectives of and experiences with implementing their project, how they
view the collective progress made by the WSC community, and what issues they think are
important for the WSC community to consider moving forward. We invite you to participate in
a short questionnaire and a facilitated small group discussion with project team members’
other WSC projects. Your participation is completely voluntary. You may choose not to
participate, or may stop participating at any time.
The purpose of the written questionnaire is to gather individuals’ perspectives of and
experiences with implementing a WSC project. The questionnaire will take five minutes of your
time and can be completed before or after the small group discussion.
In the small group discussion we hope to learn how you view the collective progress made by
the WSC community and to facilitate cross-project conversation about continued or emerging
needs for the WSC community to address. The small group discussion is part of a 90 minutes of
organized sessions during the WSC PI meeting. Each of the three small groups in the room will
have an opportunity to share key ideas from their discussion with the other small groups
toward the end of the session.
My colleague [NAME OF NOTETAKER] will be taking notes on the small group discussion. After
the session, we will provide WSC with the completed questionnaires, charts, and typed notes.
No individuals will be identified.
The information will inform programmatic improvements and adjustments to documents that
convey funding opportunities (e.g., program solicitations, Dear Colleague Letters, etc.) as well
as improvements in the program’s outreach to and community-building activities with the
environmental modeling community. We hope the small group discussions may also catalyze
opportunities for networking, collaboration, and coordination of future research activities
among the research community members that participate.
Our collection of information through the questionnaire and small group discussion have been
reviewed and approved under OMB Control Number3145-0215.
Do you have any questions before we begin?

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Part A: Written Questionnaire (5 minutes)
1. Considering WSC as a research focus:
a. What do you find interesting?
b. What do you find challenging?
2. In what ways (if any) were your enacted WSC project activities and/or outcomes
different than those originally proposed? What were the reason(s) for these
differences?
3. VERSION A: If you are a Faculty Researcher on the WSC project: In what way(s) has
your WSC experience influenced your laboratory or research focus, if at all?
VERSION B: If you are a Graduate Researcher or Postdoctoral Researcher the WSC
project: In what way(s) has your WSC experience influenced your views of or goals in
science, if at all?
4. What do you consider the greatest insight (take-home message) of the WSC project?
Part B: Small Group Discussion (30 minutes)
1. Give an example of how you think WSC has influenced “environmental science” in each
of the following areas:
a. Changing the nature or focus of questions posed
b. Adding new, or novel ways of incorporating existing, frameworks and methods
c. Changing the nature or focus of graduate student and postdoctoral training
d. Adding new undergraduate course content
e. Changing the nature or focus of community outreach
f. Adding new, or novel ways of incorporating existing, cyberinfrastructure for
data gathering, long-term data access, or computation
2. In what ways (if any) has WSC prepared you for future projects including possibilities
under “Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (INFEWS)”?
3. Given the legacy of WSC and the continued activity of INFEWS, does the field need to
continue in this direction and why?
4. What improvements in the process or use of environmental modelling are needed?
Why?
5. What are the next great challenges in environmental modelling? Why are they
important?
Part C: Small Group Share Out (30 minutes)
• Each of the three small groups has ~10 minutes to share out key ideas from their
discussion with the members of the other two small groups and initiate whole group
discussion of those ideas (if desired).

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