03 Call Digest

[stefaniebutland]

Hi @nmfs-openscapes/2022-noaa-sefsc-fall-cohort !

The highlight of Cohort Call 3 was having guests from the AFSC Marine Mammal Laboratory (MML) talk about how their Winter 2022 Openscapes experience led them to reframe their Stock Assessment Reports (SAR) as a kind collaborative effort (one step at a time!). Their presentation was really accessible and inspiring - check out the excerpted comments in the Digest below.

We’re hearing that with so many communication channels it has been confusing to know where to look for key Openscapes information, separate from optional extra sessions and discussions. Here’s how we’ll try to make things clearer.

These Digests include key information from each Cohort Call, including the Task associated with that Call. Digests are posted as a GitHub Issue in your Cohort repo in the week after a Call. You’ll receive an email as long as you have notifications for the repo set to Watch > Participating and @mentions or All activity (screenshot at bottom of this issue).

All current optional coworking and learning opportunities are listed at the bottom of this issue. From now on, any new key information that comes up between Digests will be shared by email. When you have additional questions, something to share, or to discuss, we can find each other in our Cohort Google Space and in Openscapes Slack where you can connect with other current and past Openscapes Champions.

👋 Our group photo is in our Cohort Folder 😀

Wishing you a week in which you feel safe to share your wildly creative ideas!

Stef, Julie, Molly, Ady

Digest: Cohort Call 03 [ 2022-noaa-sefsc-fall ]

Cohort Google Drive folder - contains agendas, video recordings, slides, pathways folder

openscapes.github.io/2022-noaa-sefsc-fall - cohort webpage

Goals: We discussed team culture, psychological safety, and data strategies for future us with guests from AFSC Marine Mammal Laboratory (MML)

Task: Have a Seaside Chat with your broader research group. Continue your Pathway - shifting to “Next Steps” and think about onboarding/offboarding.

Slide Decks:

• Psychological safety (slides)
• Data strategies for Future Us by the AFSC MML team (slides)

A few lines from shared notes in the Agenda doc, excerpted from all 4 NMFS Cohorts

What is something that you or someone has done on a team to make it psychologically safe to speak up with a wildly creative idea or a problem that no one else saw?

• Ground rules discussion during the first meeting of a new group +1+1+1+1+1
• Being grateful for what each team member brings to the project +1+1+1+1
• allowing yourself to be vulnerable is such a huge thing with code development and sharing
• We talked about wanting to work on sharing things with team members earlier in our work processes.
• Playfulness and light-heartedness of team lead that encourage outside-the-box thinking; opens the discussion to the “what if…”
• Willingness to say “I don’t know” in answer to questions, especially when the person admitting they don’t know is a leader or subject matter expert; gives others permission to publicly not know, share, learn
• “Yes and” and a combination of mutual respect and diversity of backgrounds and approaches
• Seaside chats are group therapy, figuring out how to implement these tools a bit at a time to keep it from being overwhelming +100!
• it takes time and consistency of having viewpoints appreciated when shared to feel safe, the importance of keeping ourselves in check to give others space and time to share, having trust within the group and knowing that they all have noble intent and aren't going to think that what I say is coming from a threatening place, taking the emphasis off of having to prove ourselves in a space, showing vulnerability, +1
• Borrow idea from fieldwork: How will we go about this? And debrief: how did it go? what did we learn? Not only as emergency response. A set schedule
• Someone was safe to go into the field with others, but not as willing to share code. That awareness was mind-opening
• Having socials during work time so that everyone is able to attend +1+1+1+1

How do these data strategies (presented by AFSC Marine Mammal Laboratory team) resonate with you / in your work?

• Very helpful to be reminded that change does not have to happen all at once! It’s a process.+1+1+1+1+1
• ‎I know what to do and where to focus now. It helped me just think about what works now and what doesn’t and what to do about it for the team.
• Creating reusable data wrangling tools is very appealing. I had never thought about what a huge fraction of my “science” time is spent tidying code, but that really resonated with me! +1
• Tidy as a way to support generic not bespoke coding!!! +1

Do you work with data or contribute to reports? What do data/text components look like when you first see them?

• ‎I have never worked on a team as described in this session, so I am a little terrified and excited at the same time
• I am starting to use forks. Slide 20 gave such an amazing visual of how to think about how forked versions play into the whole workflow. I am inspired to create a similar visual that will help explain other projects/workflows I am a part of. +1+1
  • Agree with above - just grabbed a piece of paper to sketch out the use of forks for my project while seeing that slide :-) +1(we did too!) (I love paper)
• Aside from chomping at the bit to build off of all of their amazing efforts, I really appreciate the ability to not only say a process was inefficient and “unacceptable,” but to do something about it and to find small and incremental ways to make a change. +1
• Reading in the raw data and showing the process of how it’s wrangled. Also adding to a README file in the raw data folders, that I add to every time I get a new file. The readme is not just a summary but a timeline of when I got the data, who gave it to me, and their contact info. I feel like this is part of the raw data! +1+1 +1 (this is so meta) +1 +1 +1 +1 +1
• Being able to automate the reproducible report is a game changer! +1+1+1

General reflections/reactions/questions

• I love the focus on culture, rather than just tooling. It is easy to focus on the “right tools” without thinking about the culture you hope to produce. I like the emphasis on an iterative process, too, which is what I have always noticed - it takes trial and error to find the right tools and workflows that fit in with the group culture. Tools are not one-size-fits-all. +1
• It’s really important to have these successful case studies at NOAA where at least in my experience we are always being questioned if all these reproducible workflow things are worth the time/effort/investment in them. Quantifying the payoff is very important! And IMO it is a snowball effect where the more of us do it, the easier and less time consuming it is for everyone. +2+1+1
  • Josh London (AFSC) emphasizes too that it’s about time saving but also about a better quality product +100
• There is a lot to wrangle here via the Openscapes recommendations, and learning new methods is a little intimidating but overall it is less anxiety inducing than my earlier personal dumpster fire of a workflow.

Coworking and learning opportunities (optional)

It’s ok to use Coworking as your Seaside Chat time.

Tues Nov 8 - SEFSC coworking, 10:00 - 11:00 am PT / 1:00 - 2:30 pm ET.

Tues Nov 8 - Themed Cross-Cohort Coworking, 1:00 - 2:30 pm PT / 4:00 - 5:30 pm ET.

Presentation will be recorded and added to your Cohort Google Folder

Making reproducible reports using Quarto. Eli Holmes will give a brief introduction to Quarto and has provided some templates you can use to get started:

• NOAA Quarto simple website with R in qmd or Rmd files (GitHub source | website )
• NOAA Quarto book with R and download PDF or docx (GitHub source | website)
• DRAFT Quarto template to create a pdf with the elements for a NOAA Tech Memo (GitHub source | report pdf)

Thur Nov 9 - Drop-in Git / GitHub help, 11:30 - 12:00 PT / 2:30 - 3:00 pm ET (add to your Google Cal)

These sessions are for those who want to get their computer connected to Git and GitHub. Before attending, please install GitHub Desktop and work through the short how-to videos linked from our Cross-Cohort Coworking doc under Drop-in Git / GitHub help.

Digest notifications

Digests are posted as a GitHub Issue in your Cohort repo in the week after a Call. You’ll receive an email as long as you have notifications for the repo set to Watch > Participating and @mentions or All activity