IDCN Talent Management Platform is a collection of data science tools that help individuals and companies understand IDCN's membership.
This project originated in IDCN Copenhagen in January 2018. The code base was written originally to pull demographic information from the membership database to understand where individuals wanted to go in the Danish economy. Copenhagen's Membership Team then realized that the code base could be used to expedite its Monthly Report on the status of the membership, as well as to generate quickly various spreadsheets of interest to other teams. The results were an acceleration of membership data generation and a deeper understanding of the interests of the organization.
We now envision this project as an opportunity for IDCN members who are interested in data science to learn the R programming language in a practical business setting, as well as a chance for those who plan to enter data science to contribute to a useful open source project and thus bolster a data science portfolio. To that end, much of the code is heavily commented, so that new practitioners can treat it as a tutorial for data wrangling, data analysis, and data visualization.
This project has enormous potential for expansion, and we strongly encourage ideas for extending functionality, speeding production, and improving visualization.
IDCN TMP consists of the following scripts:
| Script | Description |
|---|---|
| MonthlyReport.R | provides various counts and charts of active and inactive members |
| TDP.R | plots desired job placement outcomes of active members |
| extractTMP.R | loads into R a local copy of a membership database |
| installLibraries.R | lists package dependencies, some of which may require manual installation with a package manager |
| loadThemes.R | contains themes and color palettes for various plots |
| getSubtables.R | constructs .xlsx files of interest to volunteer teams |
| transformandplotTMP.R | prepares the TMP for plotting for the Targeted Demographics Report |
| constructGraphs.R | constructs plots for the Targeted Demographics Report |
To test code locally and to produce charts, it is recommended that you download R and RStudio. Alternatively, there are resources that compile R code online, such as https://rdrr.io/snippets/.
If you have never programmed with R, check the following resources:
- Installing R: https://www.r-project.org/
- Installing RStudio: https://www.rstudio.com/
- Installing dependencies: https://github.com/IDCN/talent-management-platform/blob/master/installLibraries.R
R's installation behavior is platform dependent. An installation on MacOS may not be the same as an installation on Windows or Linux. If you run into issues with an installation, a good resource for finding solutions is StackOverflow, which is one of the most important programming resources on the Internet.
If an IDCN chapter decides to participate in the IDCN TMP project, it is recommended that a volunteer who has access to SINCRON be dedicated to the project. In particular, IDCN Copenhagen's Membership Team is composed of at least one person with SINCRON access whose responsibilities include maintaining and extending the IDCN TMP code.
Any communication regarding technical issues that relate to the project (such as bug reports, feature requests, installation difficulties, etc.) should be done in IDCN TMP's Issues Page.
General discussion about all things that relate to IDCN TMP or to the application of data science in general to IDCN initiatives should be held at https://idcn-github.slack.com/.
We appreciate all contributions. Especially of note is that it is not necessary to have programming experience to contribute. (No programming experience is needed to request a new feature!) If you are planning to contribute back bug-fixes, please do so without any further discussion.
If you plan to contribute new features, utility functions or extensions to the core, please first open an issue and discuss the feature with us. Absent a discussion, a pull request is very likely to be rejected. After opening an issue, create a branch from master and name it after your intended contribution. (For example, if you wanted to add a bar chart that shows where inactive members have been employed, create a new branch from master and name it "inactive-employment-plot".) For more information about branching, please refer to the GitHub Guide on Understanding the GitHub Flow.
For more details, please refer to Contributing to IDCN's Talent Management Platform.
IDCN TMP is an open source project driven by IDCN volunteers who want to construct data science tools to help the International Dual Career Network understand its membership and advance its objectives.
IDCN TMP is currently maintained by Jon Middleton and Jamile Queiroz de Sousa.