Working Together
We are excited to work with your team to help you develop reproducible workflows to process, harmonize, and analyze the large amount of (heterogeneous) data necessary to conduct synthesis science. Those reproducible workflows will help you to integrate new information more easily, iterate more quickly to test your various hypotheses, and enable you to better collaborate. We currently offer a range of options for what our collaboration might look like. The categories below are not exhaustive so if you think your needs will fall between or outside of these tasks, please don’t hesitate to contact our team to start that conversation!
Tasks
This level of collaboration is the core of our value to working groups! When your group identifies a data-related need (e.g., designing an analytical workflow, creating a website, writing an R Shiny app, etc.), you reach out to our team and get the conversation started. During that time we will work closely with you to define the scope of the work and get a clear picture of what “success” looks like in this context.
Once the task is appropriately defined, the conversation moves on to how independently you’d like us to work. This varies dramatically between tasks even within a single working group and there is no single right answer! For some tasks, we are capable of working completely independently and returning to your team with a finished product in hand for review but we are equally comfortable working closely with you throughout the life-cycle of a task.
Analytical Sprints
For larger tasks, we offer “analytical sprints.” If your group requests an analytical sprint, you will get one of our team members working full time only for your group’s tasks for 3-4 weeks! This can be a great option if your group has many smaller tasks or fewer larger projects that are particularly time-sensitive.
We are excited that these sprints are a part of our “menu” of offerings to you all but please reach out to us to start the conversation before requesting a sprint so that we can make sure we are all on the same page.
Weekly Office Hours
Each of our staff members offers a one-hour block weekly as a standing office hour each week. This is a great time to join us with small hurdles or obstacles you’re experiencing in a given week. For example, previous office hours have dealt with topics like refreshing on git/GitHub vocabulary, authenticating the googledrive R package, or solving a specific error in a new R script.
Workshops & Trainings
With those workshops, our team aim at helping you to further develop skills in reproducible data science to enable your team to better collaborate and efficiently tackle data and analytical challenges. It is sometimes the case that your working group wants to become more familiar (or get a refresher) on a tool you’d like to include in your group’s workflow. To that end we can design and offer workshops on a selection of data science tools. Our current workshops catalog includes a Collaborative Coding with GitHub, a primer on the tidyverse R packages, and a review of the fundamentals of R Shiny apps. Our past workshops are summarized here and we are happy to offer new workshops if your group wants a workshop on something within our knowledge base. These workshops are typically done remotely (we can also accommodate time during one of your meeting) and last 2-3 hours but we can be flexible with that timing depending on your group’s needs.
Similarly, we also have been creating more ‘go at your own pace’-style tutorials that can be accessed here. These tutorials are usually smaller in scope than workshops but are still built to maximize value to your group either as review or first contact with a given subject. As with the workshops, we are happy to create new tutorials if something comes up for your team so please reach out and we can discuss further!