A CW20 - 2020-03-31 to 2020-04-02

Idea 9 - CI9-CW20: Storyboarding Sustainability

Participants

  • Emma Rand
  • Matthew West
  • Laurence Brown
  • Mario Antonioletti
  • Alison Clarke

Context / Research Domain

Many research domains where PIs may not have an awareness of reproducibility and sustainability best practice, may not consider it is relevant to their group or may not know where to start.

Problem

PIs are not always aware of the need to consider sustainability from the start of their project. They may be unable to reproduce data, e.g. reproducing figures which were created by a PhD student who has moved on. They may not build time into grants for ensuring sustainability/reproducibility. Alternatively, the PI is aware of gaps in their understanding and little idea of where to start addressing this problem.

Solution

We want to produce a storyboard/script for a 10 minute video which can be sent to PIs. The video will:

  • Make the point that it applies to their research group
  • Outline clear benefits of working sustainably
  • Outline issues that arise by not doing so
  • Suggest key questions they can ask their group members
  • Signpost some fundamental small steps they can do quickly/easily
  • Signpost training resources for their group members and for themselves.

The script and storyboard will be made available on GitHub so that groups or institutions can easily produce their own video. Ideally, it will be easily tailored to different domains, e.g. ‘hard’ sciences, social sciences, digital humanities.

We could ask our CW20 attendee colleagues for horror stories for non-sustainable approaches to give anecdotes.

References

Diagrams

xkcd 242 - the difference

The Difference (https://www.xkcd.com/242/)

Notes

_Our ideas: _

  1. Multi uni. Issue: reform weekly telcom system. 15-10 people in a meeting, no fixed agenda, n minutes, no action items. Small team culture hasn’t scaled. Domination by one PI. how to change in a positive way. Technology change could be a catalyst for culture change. Overcoming resistance. Gaining senior allies. Lead by example - chair a meeting.
  2. FAIR principles of what constitutes good software. Not package-specific, more generic wrt technology and more specific to research context
  3. _ Produce a short 10-minute video stating the benefits of sustainability, reproducibility, targeting PIs and to show them how by doing this they can save time and money. Do it for research groups._
  4. _Acronyms clashes between IT and domain. Create a curated list of acronyms to facilitate communication. Research for staff and students. Start computationally using ‘publications’ coming from the dept to identify the list of acronyms. Raises awareness on communicating across disciplines. _

_ Compelling media that articulates to PIs_

  • That reproducibility and sustainability applies to their research group even if they don’t consider themselves creators of software
  • It’s valuable wrt time to them
  • It’s do-able for them
  • Any step towards it is good; perfection not required.
  • Find compelling examples that show the benefits of taking a sustainable approach towards doing reproducible research