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 more intense support, 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.
Trainings
We have three primary methods for helping your group further develop skills in reproducible data science to enable your team to better collaborate and efficiently tackle data and analytical challenges. To access a category of our skill development content, click the corresponding dropdown menu in the navbar at the top of this website.
We are also happy to design new workshops, tutorials, or tips if your group wants training on something within our knowledge base for which we haven’t yet built something.
Workshops
Workshops are typically done remotely and last 2-3 hours but we can be flexible with that timing depending on your group’s needs. We can also accommodate time during one of your meetings if desired.
Tutorials
The tutorials tend to be smaller in scope than the full workshops and more ‘go at your own pace’-style. Despite that, they are still built to maximize value to your group either as review or first contact with a given subject.
Tips
Finally, we’ve also curated a set of ‘code tips’ that are even smaller in scale than the tutorials. These are often just a short summary of our team’s opinion on a given subject.
Selected Portfolio Items
We thought it might be nice to highlight a few representative products that have come out of our support in order to make our services a little more tangible.
- Data harmonization & wrangling – |
- Spatial data processing – |
- Creating a website for your working group to showcase products –
- Advice on project structure and file naming conventions –
- Designing standalone GitHub repositories for particular papers – |
- Creating an R package for frequently used tools – |
- Writing & deploying interactive Shiny apps –
If desired, we are also happy to write parts of the Methods and/or Results sections of manuscripts being prepared for publication. We do not require you to add members of our team as co-authors on any product. That said, many groups offer authorship if we meet the criteria they set out for their other collaborators.