jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
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Subcategories: Communications Tools, Credit, Digital Humanities, Hosting Conferences/Events, Other, Training Researchers, Working across institutions
Other tags: | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Strategy: Managing Up | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Minto Pyramid - Adam Amran, Untools Amran gives a very clear formula here for emails that you also see in advice for briefing boards (or in our case, e.g., scientific advisory committee.). Start with a one-sentence paragraph of the conclusion (or the ask); then a listing of the key arguments; then the supporting details. I’d add that the subject line should reflect the conclusion/ask. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I’m generally ok about writing to-the-point, skimmable emails. But that skill may have...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Working across an organization | Strategy: Working with Stakeholders | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers | Working With A Research Community: Digital Humanities |
Organic and Locally Sourced: Growing a Digital Humanities Lab with an Eye Towards Sustainability - Rebekah Cummings, David S. Roh, Elizabeth Callaway, Digital Humanities Quarterly A useful article on setting up a Digital Humanities “pop up” lab in the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, after an earlier attempt had failed. The story told here of learning from (and building on) previous attempts and using the lab not simply at a thing in and of itself but as a concrete thing for a nascent cross-campus effort...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Meetings | Strategy: Alignment | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Learning with Fist of Five Voting - Jake Calabrese We’ve talked before about the benefits of not asking your team binary yes/no questions about agreement but “on a scale of 1..5”; e.g. in #39 when mentioning the use of zoom polls. This gives people who aren’t comfortable with a direction a way to express that without coming out and saying no. And if a number of people vote 1 or 2 or 3, that will give them a bit more confidence in discussing why. Calabrese...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Digital Humanities | Strategy: Project Management |
Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook - Beth Fischer and Hannah Jacob, Wired!, Duke University Fischer and Jacob are starting off on what looks like a really exciting project, assembling a handbook for starting digital projects in the humanities. It will be interesting to what comes of this effort - and if your team has helped support such a project, they’re seeking contributions.
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Working With A Research Community: Credit |
Second thoughts on Proper Citation Guidance for Software Developers A good recent blog post on the pros and cons of different approaches to software citation by Daniel S. Katz, who’s thought about this a lot. Some key points: any method is going to take extra work by someone; there may not be a one-size-fits all approach; and in the end, code just isn’t the same as a paper (amongst other things, there’s no one point at which it’s done). Daniel ends the post leaning tentatively...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events |
If you build it, they will come…but then what? Facilitating communities of practice in R, Kate Hertweck A lot of research computing teams I’ve seen have started regular training sessions for researchers; sometimes on a specific area, sometimes as ”Tech Talks” with varying topics. The model is generally one of having the technical team teach the researchers things, which is good and valuable but a little limiting and not really sustainable - you have to keep coming up with topics, teaching them, and hoping they stick. What...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
6 Tips on How to Say No To Customers - Sharon Moorhouse, Intercom We work closely with researchers, and that can make it hard to say no to a feature request. This article walks through the process, which is normally pretty routine but can run the risk of leaving hurt feelings. The tips most relevant to us are: Explain why Involve the (researcher) in finding another solution Focus on the job to be done, not the `no’ Understand both sides It’s ok to lose a...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
How To Run A Free Online Academic Conference - Franklin Sayre, Tisha Mentnech, Amy Riegelman, Vicky Steeves, Shirley Zhao Successful research computing projects build a research community around them, but not always on the scale where throwing a national or international conference or workshop to bring practitioners together seems like it would make sense. And even if it might make sense, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to test the idea first, to see how it goes? This evolving Google Doc distills what the...
Continue...Creating a Slack Writing Etiquette Guide for Your Workplace - RC Victorino, Slab This is a great overview on using Slack well in a workspace. Like so much, whether the tool is used effectively or not comes down to setting clear expectations, and it’s our job as manager to set and communicate those expectations. The points the article makes strike me as dead on, although it took me a while to come to these realizations myself (in particular I hate hate hated Slack threads when...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Moderating Discussions over Video - Beth Andres-Beck Working remotely and communicating online doesn’t really introduce new problems so much as it greatly amplifies exiting problems that can otherwise be papered over with in-person interactions. Some meetings are pretty straightforward and translate well to online - standups, or team status updates. But it if you want to have a brainstorming meeting or a meeting to come up with a new solution to a problem - or even choose which problem to solve - rather than just...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Working With A Research Community: Other | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Organizing a Conference Online: A Quick Guide - Geoffrey Rockwell, Oliver Rossier, Chelsea Miya & Casey Germain Two weeks ago I included another resource for putting together an online conference; this one explores does more to the range of different outcomes you might want a conference to have — what would make you think this conference you’re considering was successful? — and how you could arrange a virtual conference to achieve that. What’s more, it goes into a couple possibilities for ways that a virtual...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Technical Leadership: Other |
Google’s Technical Writing Courses - Google Some of us, particularly those of us who were trained in engineering departments, got technical writing training — but most of us didn’t, and the training we did get was focussed more on reserach papers (which let’s face it is a terrible model for almost any other form of writing besides research papers). Google has made available two of their internal courses on technical writing. The first course is sort of “Strunk and White for people who work with...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Design Docs, Markdown, and Git - Caitie McCaffrey Azure Sphere Security Services used a Word/Sharepoint workflow for drafting, circulating, refining, and approving design documents wasn’t working, so they trialed a move to using markdown and git for their design documents. It was a success, and here they write up their approach. Not every design document corresponds to just on repository’s worth of code, so they chose to have one single repo for design documents for their organization organization, to support discoverability and large/unconstrained multi-codebase architectural...
Continue...The New Science of Building Great Teams - Alex “Sandy” Pentland, HBR “Bursty” Communication Can Help Remote Teams Thrive Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley, Behavioural Scientist These two articles circulated independently this week, expressing related ideas about how communication works in high performing teams. The first emphasizes how communication works between team members. It’s worth reading, but two key points: Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet. Members connect directly with one another—not just with...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing Your Career: Other | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Strategy: Working with Decision Makers |
Email Etiquette: How to Ask People for Things and Actually Get a Response - Jocelyn Glei As you move up in research computing (or anywhere really) you start communicating more, especially upwards, with people whose attention is torn between more and more things. That means for your emails to work you have to make them increasingly self-contained but also concise. There’s 9 points here but four of them are key tools in my kit: Lead with the ask - You’re sending this email to achieve...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events |
Mentored Sprints Community Handbook - Tania Allard and Cheuk Ting Ho This is really interesting. Is someone on your team working on a community software project and has been thinking about a (now virtual) hackathon or community sprint with other members of the community? This very detailed handbook discusses how to organize and run such an effort.
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
4 ways to improve your writing and communication in your free time - Jessica Thiefels Written communication is remote work super power - Snir David Asynchronous Communication Builds Respect and Trust - Dexter Sy, Tech Management Life A lot of us in research and computing ended up here because we preferred working in math or code over writing. But writing is an incredibly useful skill to hone — it helps us communicate with our team now, and with our stakeholders; and it helps develop our...
Continue...A framework to assess the quality and impact of bioinformatics training across ELIXIR - Kim T. Gurwitz et al. Speaking of training - A lot of us run online training programmes, but fewer have systematic ways of following up and quantifying how it impacted on trainee’s success in their research. In this paper, the ELIXIR project - an EU-wide set of life sciences resources - reports on their quality and impact of training courses with four years of self-reported survey data of almost three thousand...
Continue...My Screencasting Workflow - Laurie Barth Screencasts can be very useful for training materials. Very experienced screen caster Laurie Barth offers her workflow here. Barth records the screencast without audio, then adds annotations, and only when after that does she record an audio trac narrating it. That extra step seems like it would take extra time, but I’ve tried the whole narrating-while-typing thing before and it’s pretty hard and took either extra takes or living with lots of “umms”. I’ll try this next time.
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Other | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Drawing good architecture diagrams - Toby W, (UK) National Cyber Security Centre A nice overview of drawing architecture diagrams. The article makes the point that the diagram is about communicating, and if it doesn’t communicate the key points of the system to the readers, then it’s not succeeding. I like this advice: Start with a basic high level concept diagram which provides a summary. Then create separate diagrams that use different lenses to zoom into the various parts of your system. Having multiple diagrams of...
Continue...Asynchronous Meetings: Everything You Need to Know - Fellow App As we get more and more comfortable with distributed teams, there’s increasing interest in written asynchronous team communication. It has the advantage of retaining a record and allowing people to contribute on their own schedule. Some things are hard to do asynchronously - it’s hard to imagine an asynchronous one-on-one being successful - but some are quite easy like status updates. We know (from, for instance, open source) that complex decisions can be made with...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Working With A Research Community: Credit |
High level overview of how Australian Research Data Commons is viewing Research Software as a First Class Object - Tom Honeyman on Twitter This is a really interesting diagram of how ARDC is thinking of research software: Here's a preview of what we're thinking (high level) for a national agenda for #researchsoftware as a first class object @ARDC_AU. Feedback welcome pic.twitter.com/XtfwhK48DN— Tom Honeyman (@TomHoneyman3) November 30, 2020 The approach is I think the right one, and one I’ve advocated before; taking a path-to-maturity model approach,...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing Your Career: Other |
Writing Is One of the Best Things You Can Invest In, as a Software Engineer. The More Experienced People Become, the More They Tend to Realize This. - Gergely Ortoz Speaking of non-technical skills being underrepresented in technical job descriptions… Communicating well is absolutely essential part of a job in any interdisciplinary endeavour like research computing, and written communication is becoming absolutely vital as teams go remote. That doesn’t necessarily mean particularly good grammar or vocabulary - we’re an international community, many in our community...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Strategy: Marketing | Strategy: Product/Service Management |
If you build it, promote it, and they trust you, then they will come: Diffusion strategies for science gateways and cyberinfrastructure adoption to harness big data in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) community - Kerk F. Kee, Bethanie Le, Kulsawasd Jitkajornwanich Software packages, like ideas, don’t in fact speak for themselves. Getting any sizeable number of people to adopt a new idea, new practice, or new tool requires enormous amount of coordinated communication effort. In this paper, Kee, Le, and Jitkajornwanich describe what...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools |
Writing in the Sciences (Coursera Course) - Kristin Sainani Writing is one of those things that many of us got into science or computing to avoid. But written communication, especially to stakeholders and the public, is vital for effective product management in research computing. Sainani has what looks like a pretty good short course on writing for within research communities and to the public: Topics include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, peer...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Strategy: Change Management |
Prattfalls: Better Communication - Roy Rapoport The Art of the Tick Tock - Lara Hogan, Wherewithall It’s too easy for us as manager to say things to a team member one-on-one or to the team as a group and for it to seemingly not register, or for it to be understood in a different way we intended. Rapoport has a useful model for those of us in tech of how to think about these misfires. In Rapoport’s model, the purpose of communication is to successfully...
Continue...Collaboration and Team Science: A Field Guide - L. Michelle Bennett, Howard Gadlin, Christophe Marchand, NIH National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Collaboration Plans: Practical Considerations Spanning Across Individual Collaborators to Institutional Supports - Kara L. Hall, Amanda L. Vogel, Kevin Crowston, Strategies for Team Science Success Operationalization, implementation, and evaluation of Collaboration Planning: A pilot interventional study of nascent translational teams - Betsy Rolland et al., Journal of Clinical and Translational Science Research computing and data work is inherently interdisciplinary; we often bring our computing and...
Continue...Filtering your language as an engineering leader - Rob Begbie, LeadDev Borrowing Lines from Great Leaders Around You - Lara Hogan, LeadDev Everyone who’s managed or been a team lead for long enough has had the experience of thinking aloud or asking an idle question and then having a team member waste hours following up on what they thought was now a Suddenly Important Thing. As a manager we need to stay involved in the work enough to understand what issues are likely to come...
Continue...Ten simple rules for teaching applied programming in an authentic and immersive online environment - Frances Hooley, Peter J. Freeman, Angela C. Davies, PLoS Comp Bio This is a nice set of recommendations of teaching long-form courses online. The lessons come from the authors’ experiences teaching a masters degree and a postgraduate certificate in clinical bioinformatics in particular, but its recommendations should apply quite broadly to teaching researchers computing skills, and fall under: Teaching - they emphasize the pedagogy quite a bit, especially important in...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals | Managing A Team: Other | Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools | Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing |
Words Matter: Is Your Digital Communication Style Impacting Your Employees? - Samantha Rae Ayoub, Fellow “We need to talk”. “Fine.” These all messages or responses that would be very uncomfortable for us to receive from our boss; but when things are busy it’s pretty easy for us to communicate in exactly that way with our team members or peers. Your boss (probably) isn’t a jerk, and neither are you, but when we have a lot of things on our mind it’s easy to not pay...
Continue...How to break out of the thread of doom - Tanya Reilly, LeadDev 5 situations when synchronous communication is a must - Hiba Amin, Hypercontext We’re all spending a lot more time in written communication than we were before, and there are huge advantages! But there are some common failure modes, including having interminable conversations that don’t actually result in some conclusion. Reilly has three hints for winding up those discussions: Rollup: distill a long thread into the state of the conversation - “To summarize:...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Software Development | Working With A Research Community: Other |
Low-code contributions through GitHub - Isabela Presedo-Floyd, Mars Lee, Melissa Weber, Mendonça, Tony Fast, Quansight Labs Interesting experience getting people who wouldn’t normally code to make contributions to a project via github. In this case, the effort was around alt text for images (including scientific diagrams!) for a project, based on pull requests, but I could imagine it working well for documentation, sourcing diagrams, or other contributions. The team’s process was: pre-meeting preparation with a project contributor and meeting facilitator a crash course in the...
Continue...How to get useful answers to your questions - Julia Evans Evans gives advice for how to get useful answers to questions - the context she uses is technical questions, but honestly the approach works just as well for getting your boss or collaborators to answer questions in email, or anything else. She offers two pieces of advice for making it easier for the question-answerer to give you the answer: Ask yes/no questions State your current understanding And two pieces of advice for getting more...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Working With A Research Community: Other |
How To Produce a Webinar Series - Osni Marques et al., HPC Best Practices (HPC-BP) Webinar Series The Exascale Computing Project has hosted 58 roughly monthly webinars on “HPC Best Practices”, so they’ve gotten it down to more or less a science now. In this github repo, the organizers have a check list, a guidance email to presenters, and a paper from 2019 describing their experiences. This might be a good starting point if your group or community wanted to start organizing such a series....
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Prioritization | Working With A Research Community: Other |
How To Do Less - Alex Turek Four Steps to Organizational Change Without the Drama - Deiwin Sarjas Turek walks through the steps of digging yourself and your team out of a hole via absolutely ruthless prioritization - picking exactly one priority and only advancing that goal. That means advancing it either directly through work on the priority, or through making work more effective by changing how and what work is being done. The hardest part of doing this is the communications with others, and...
Continue...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Other | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events | Becoming A Manager: Meetings |
How to Run an Organized Town Hall Meeting - Alexandria Hewko, Fellow Town Halls are a pretty common format in our discipline, and… they’re often not great. They’re ad-hoc, mostly prepared talks, and so generally not super well-received (and, thus, not generally well-attended). Why bother if you can read the slides and the Q&A afterwards, right? We’re all busy. Hewko gives some advice for running a town hall which is actually a community event rather than a broadcast from HQ: Have a recurring meeting cadence...
Continue...Other tags: | Strategy: Product/Service Management | Working With A Research Community: Other |
ACI-REF Leading Practices of Facilitation - Advanced CyberInfrastructure - Research and Education Facilitators This is a document outlining what exactly a research computing and data facilitator does. The role gets called a lot of different things. A million years ago I was a “Technical Analyst”, one of the many completely opaque job titles we give ourselves in this line of work, but it was this role. When I took on this role, the centre was just starting up and we were trying to figure out...
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