Working Group Setup Checklist

Note

Please note that the following checklist of working group setup steps is meant to serve as internal documentation only! Our team will be taking these steps on your behalf when you are funded so none of these steps are things you (a working member/PI) need to handle.

Feel free to contact us if you find these instructions useful and want to apply them to non-working group contexts!

When new working groups are funded, our team takes a number of setup steps to create some of the infrastructure that past groups have requested/found useful. This is mainly an attempt to help the group avoid spending their precious in-person meeting time doing relatively dry technical steps that we can easily accomplish early-on. Some of these steps also set a useful ‘tone’ in terms of facilitating groups’ adherence to reproducibility best practices.

Shared Google Drive

Many groups gravitate towards using Google Drive for storing data, relevant scientific literature, and (eventually) manuscript drafts. One advantage of a true Shared Drive over simply creating a folder and sharing that is that the distributed ownership of the Shared Drive makes it very difficult to accidentally delete/lose important files.

Some groups have experience serious heartbreak when one member’s Google identity gets closed by their institution and all files/folders created by that member vanish. A Shared Drive makes this horror story an impossibility.

Creating the Shared Drive

Our @nceas.ucsb.edu email addresses are empowered to create Shared Drives. Navigate to your Google Drive, then in the left sidebar click “Shared drives”. Once there you can click the “+ New” button to create a brand new Shared Drive.

The naming convention you should use is LTER-WG_<WG-Abbreviation> or LTER-SPARC_WG-Abbreviation for full synthesis working groups and SPARC groups respectively.

Note that for groups with longer names you will want to abbreviate so that the Shared Drive name doesn’t get ambiguously cropped in a default browser window.

Adding Users

Once the Shared Drive exists, add the following people as “Content Managers”:

  • All members of the Scientific Computing team
  • Marty Downs (LTER Network Office Director)
  • Thomas Hetmank (NCEAS Programmer/Analyst)

When you reach out to the working groups you can also make a note of their emails and add them as well though you may want to first tell them about the Shared Drive before sending them a semi-random Shared Drive invite.

Content Creation

We want to use as light a touch as possible here to make sure that groups feel empowered to make their Shared Drive whatever they need it to be but there are a few things we can do.

Copy the template Google Sheets we’ve created (found in this Drive folder) and move the copies into their Shared Drive.

GitHub Repository

We encourage all groups to engage with GitHub for–at minimum–storing their final code products. We have found that creating a GitHub repository at this stage tends to increase adoption of GitHub and is therefore very much worthwhile even if no group members use it at the time that their group gets funded.

Initialize Repository

Make a repository in the LTER GitHub Organization with the following information:

  1. Begin with the working group template repository
    • When you make a new repo it’ll provides an option for whether you want to use a template
  2. Create a name that fits one of the following naming conventions
    • For full working groups (3-4 meetings): “lterwg-abbreviated-group-name”
    • For SPARC groups (1 meeting): “lter-sparc-abbreviated-group-name”
  3. Set the “Description” to the title of the working group
  4. Add a README
  5. Create a .gitignore using the R template
    • R is the most common working group language and the .gitignore is easily changed in the event the group is primarily using a different language