jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Working With A Research Community
Other tags: | 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: | 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: 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...Other tags: | 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 | 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: | 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: | 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: | Technical Leadership: Software Development |
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...Other tags: | Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events |
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 |
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: 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...
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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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