5  Groups

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5.1 Management group

The project will be led by the principal investigator, with support from the co-applicants / Work Package leaders, who together form the management group. This group will be responsible for the overall coordination of the project and ensuring it’s successful completion.

5.2 Technical working group

The technical working group will be responsible for the more technical and practical aspects of the project. In this case, technical refers to the digital, computational, and organizational aspects of tasks to support the successful completion of the project. Specifically, the technical aspects are those required to fulfill the aims of Work Package 1, which is to ensure that our research is open and reproducible (or as best as possible).

There will be one tech lead for each Steno Center, which means there will be 7 tech leads plus the work package leader (Luke).

5.2.1 Responsibilities

The role of the tech lead is to:

  • Communicate and coordinate with the other tech leads and the work package leader about day-to-day operations and activities (rather than higher-level, more academic activities or tasks).
  • Identify any technical needs and barriers to being open and reproducible within each work package.
  • Brainstorm and share ideas and solutions to overcome those barriers and fill those needs.
  • Contribute to shared and common sub-projects that would assist other Steno Centers in doing their work faster, easier, and/or better (e.g. documentation or code).
  • Act as a point of contact for their Steno Center for support and help in adhering to open and reproducible practices.
  • Work towards producing as many different types of output as possible, rather than just traditional research papers. This includes making websites for documentation and practices (as well as publishing it to Zenodo) and developing sharable, reusable code (e.g., R packages).
  • Contribute to improving and supporting effective collaborative practices within and across Steno Centers and DP-Next.
  • Support in upskilling other members of each tech leads’ respective Steno Center in digitally technical skills, either informally via mentoring or formally by acting as teachers for workshops.

5.2.2 Expectations

Given the above responsibilities, we expect that tech leads will:

  • Use GitHub and Git to create and edit files.
  • Use GitHub Issues to track tasks, share progress, and discuss problems.
  • Attend regular virtual meetings to discuss challenges, share knowledge, and update on progress.
  • Use Discord to communicate with other tech leads and with other members of the project.
  • Write documentation in Markdown as much as possible.
  • When doing analyses, write code in R or Python, while also implementing reproducible practices.

5.2.3 Benefits

While there will be a bit of extra work for each tech lead, there are also a lot of benefits to being part of this group that over time can help reduce overall work and effort.

  • Support in resolving digital and technical challenges, rather than being alone to figure things out.
  • Build a bigger network that will expose the tech leads to future opportunities.
  • More quickly gain new skills and knowledge in a supportive environment with experts and peers, compared to not being part of the group.
  • An emotional support group to share struggles that are outside of our control.
  • A direct channel to the group to ask questions and get help more quickly than not being part of the group.
  • Potentially produce more academic output than would be possible alone or not in this group (e.g. “best practices for open and reproducible research” type papers or protocols).
  • Visible contributions to improving research practices within DP-Next, and for likely across the Steno Centers and even in Denmark.