9/28/2022

This week in Foss, we discussed project management and how best to apply it to our research. Starting off we broke off into groups and our group discussed what makes for good or bad project management. While most of us in the discussion only work in research groups of less than 5 people, it wasn't hard to identify good/bad skills. Go communication came up as one of the more important traits, with everyone in the project understanding their role and what their mission is. This helps people stay on track and keeps individuals from overlapping on certain tasks. From personal experience, I know better communication would have helped when starting my master's. I think my advisor could have better explained our research goal and what my task was, and at the same time I could have done a better job communicating to my advisor that my first semester classes were sometimes overwhelming and as a result, I focused less on research.

Another thing we discussed was a project governance document. This document is meant to be written before any actual work takes place and allows for the group to establish the project goals, codes of conduct, responsibilities, what is expected from individuals, and consequences for breaking any of the requirements. While my advisor will verbalize his expectations each year in a similar form, I have not heard of this being used in a research setting before. I think since I am only working on my current project with only 3 other people, it may be an overkill to write one up. However, as I may more connections in my career, and projects start to collaborate with more and more, this can prove to be an important tool to organize everything and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Another thing we discussed was utilizing research object services. This allows one to give others the opportunity to reproduce their work by basically giving uses a script to run the author's code and print the manuscript from a markup text, including the figures. I thought this was a great tool to have your work include multiple pillars of open science. It was pretty amazing, also overwhelming, seeing how hours and hours of work could be saved, compiled, and printed out in a matter of seconds. However, as we mentioned in the R4R discussion, depending on the project, having this exact research object service may not always be feasible as certain code can take a long time to run. This tool can definitely be useful for my future work as I hope to make my science more open, however, it would definitely be helpful to find an example script or skeleton as I'm not sure how much time would be worth putting into creating a research object service. But still worth making a mental note about it.