October 21, 2022, we organized the yearly workflow hackathon of the CORE lab (you can read last year’s version here)! To get all the lab members on one page and to reduce error as much as possible, we have a lab philosophy that is accompanied by various documents to facilitate our workflow. But research standards evolve and we also often notice that the way we conduct our research is not as optimal as we would like it to be. As new tools seem to be created daily, we can also not keep up with new developments without hurting our research. And it is important that those who do research daily provide input in the procedures they work with. That’s why we decided on a meeting once a year, where all lab members can have their say in how we are going to work that academic year. The new product is available here. The revision is getting smaller and smaller each year!
Here’s what we did:
We followed our usual year’s procedure to change the workflow:
- The four somewhat more senior members (Alessandro, Olivier, Ade, Migs) named three things they liked (and definitely wanted to keep), three things they did not like (and wanted to get rid of), and three things they’d like to add (Juliana, Maria, and Tetyana did not add their comments, as they only recently joined). All of this was sent in a DM to Hans so as not to influence each other.
- Hans then put all the comments in the joint Slack channel. People discussed, Hans summarized in Google Docs, and we got to final decisions through discussion during the hackathon and/or during Google Docs discussion.
Here are some things people really liked (non-exhaustive list):
- Our 2-5pm Wednesday writing block
- Standups (just like last year!)
- Weekly/monthly meetings with Hans
- Our open-science policy
- The fact that we dedicate 10-25% of our resources to replication/big-team science research!
Here are our major changes (again, a non-exhaustive list):
- We transformed our lab philosophy such that it is visually more attractive!
- We added a section to explain the replication crisis/credibility revolution. During journal club, it became clear that some of our practices were not always clear for new members, which is why we added a section explaining the background. This also included adding this great video by John Oliver.
- We created a slide deck for onboarding (still in development).
- Slack transformed its archiving policy. We are trying Zulip as an alternative for now, but we are unsure how long this will last:
Here are our major changes (again, a non-exhaustive list):
- We transformed our lab philosophy such that it is visually more attractive!
- We added a section to explain the replication crisis/credibility revolution. During journal club, it became clear that some of our practices were not always clear for new members, which is why we added a section explaining the background. This also included adding this great video by John Oliver.
- We created a slide deck for onboarding (still in development).
- Slack transformed its archiving policy. We are trying Zulip as an alternative for now, but we are unsure how long this will last:
Self-assessment
We then also did a self-assessment on various aspects:
- We posted 7 blog posts in the last year, 5 of which were mostly videos/announcements of our work. We will dedicate ourselves to writing at least three blog posts per person this coming year.
- Out of the currently listed projects, 14/35 are big-team science/replications. We thus far exceed our goal of such projects (in part because we also lead these projects!)
- We did not do statcheck reports. We will pay more attention to this.
- Only one person did plagiarism report; we will need to make sure we do this.
- We insufficiently did code review. Again, we need to make sure to do this.
- Most presentations were posted on our GitHub, but Alessandro will check with the different lab members if some were not posted.
- We did not sufficiently update our Research Milestones Sheet (which relates to insufficient reports above). Juliana will check once every three months, so that responsibility is not diffused.
That’s it for now. Make sure to read the finished product, and we always welcome suggestions!