01 Call Digest

[stefaniebutland]

Hi All!

It’s exciting to start our 2024 EPA Openscapes Champions Cohort - our 2nd Cohort with EPA! We loved hearing Jeff Hollister’s ‘Can’t Get There from Here’ story with his history in open science, and context for availability of tools in the EPA. It is powerful to hear how that has progressed and what they have enabled for EPA research and beyond. We introduced a lot of concepts in this first call; we will explore them more together in the next sessions. Below is a light digest of Call 01.

Have questions or want to connect in between sessions? Use Teams Posts group discussions, or you can email the Openscapes-EPA team. Please also join us at (optional) Coworking this Thursday, April 18, 2:00 – 3:00 pm ET. A chance to continue learning and applying these concepts to your work.

Have a good week,
Stef, Julie, Gayle, Jeff, Farnaz, Mike

Digest: Cohort Call 01 [ 2024-epa ]

Openscapes_CohortCalls [ 2024-epa ] folder - contains agendas, recordings, pathways
https://openscapes.github.io/2024-epa/- cohort webpage

Goals: We started working towards a common understanding of the Openscapes mindset and what your pathway forward looks like for your team.

Tasks: please see the Agenda doc (under Closing) for details

1. Have a Seaside Chat and start your Pathway
2. Add your GitHub username to the Cohort_ParticipantList [ 2024-epa ].xlsx spreadsheet, column F. Create a GitHub account if you don’t have one yet.
3. (optional) Attend Coworking. You should have a calendar invite for Thursday, April 18, 2:00 – 3:00 pm ET. A Practical intro to Pathways Sheet and Documentation mindset. We’ll screenshare more about the Pathways sheet and focus on Documentation, giving examples and asking you to reflect on how DO you do documentation now, and what are options for a collaborative approach. We’ll have time for group discussion and screensharing.

Slide Decks

• Openscapes mindset (slides)
• Better science for future us – Jeff Hollister (slides)

A few lines from shared notes in the Agenda doc

• “Follow the yellow brick road to open science” - Dorothy and friends didn’t have an obvious path
• Sharing screens and coding together as a group, teaching each other new techniques. +1
• Our groups do have clearly defined folders for data and information storage, but they are in sharepoint or shared EPA drives. Some individuals may be saving data outside of these folders though. There is concern about version control or others modifying their data files (e.g., a bad data sort in excel... which has happened). +1
• I am a data scientist who works on a variety of different teams of researchers. For each team, I do all my work for that team in a folder in which all team members have read access to. They can see everything I have tried both failures and successes. +1
• For the first time last year, I made an EPA GitHub repo available to the public (with associated review and clearance of the repo as a separate data product).
• Thinking about teams and where things live, who has/needs access to what. Naming files in a way I can understand them and explain them to others
• Letting go of the “analysis_final_final_final.R” approach and trusting Git to do version control. +1
• Learning how to learn