ICON in Proposals

ICON in Proposals

  1. Bring your team together to discuss ICON and decide as a team whether you would like to directly build these principles into the proposal and if so, discuss and record what your team thinks is the value added.
  2. If the answer from step 1 is yes, we suggest two actions:
    1. Go through the ‘how to ICON’ worksheet and consider using the associated Jamboard to facilitate discussion.
    2. Reach out to the ICON Science Cooperative leadership via ICONS@pnnl.gov for deeper guidance and feedback. Ideally, at least 2 months before submitting your proposal. 
  3. Following step 2, make clear decisions about how much priority will be given to each ICON principle. If there is one or more that will be a particular focus, make that decision clearly as a team and record the specific value added.
  4. Use outcomes from the ‘how to ICON’ worksheet to write your implementation plan in your proposal. Consider a subsection that precedes the Approach section of your proposal. This will help your proposal stand out and help the reviewer understand you sincerely care about transferable and mutually beneficial outcomes. In the simplest case, write out your ICON plan so it tells the reviewer:
    1. Integrated: How you will legitimately link disciplines to each other so no pieces of the project are disconnected, how you will do knowledge transfer across disciplines, and how you will ensure alignment of model needs with realities of data generation.
    2. Coordinated: The technical decisions you have made to ensure project-generated data and/or models are interoperable with data/models from other projects. 
    3. Open and FAIR: What parts of the research life cycle will and will not be open, and what technical decisions you have made to enhance FAIRness of (meta)data, including how you will know that your data/models are FAIR (e.g., are you using a FAIR evaluation tool).
    4. Networked: How you will find and engage interested parties beyond your project to learn about and support their interests, needs, and concerns while staying true to your proposed science. 
  5.  If ICON implementation varies across your proposal, consider a short paragraph in each Approach subsection. For proposals with “Broader Impacts” sections (and similar, such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s PIER Plans), consider writing how ICON guides the implementation.