03 Call Digest

[stefaniebutland]

Hi @Openscapes/2024-epa-cohort!

Thank you to Aneese Williams, Environmental Management Systems Coordinator for the City of West Palm Beach, FL for guest-teaching Data Strategies this week.

You all shared so many valuable reflections in the doc and discussions; and we appreciated the thoughtfulness around connecting within diverse and changing teams. We discussed open-ended questions and designed alliances as strategies to build psychological safety. Below is a light digest of Call 03 with a reminder of tasks for next time.

Here's our Zoomie! 😁 👋🏼

The concept of “tidy data” resonated with people! This very short post, the Tidy Data Illustrated Series (Lowndes & Horst) is a deeper walk-through. For some, the concept was new, while others were already using this strategy but didn’t have a name for it. That’s so valuable for communicating about and advocating for your work.

Don’t hesitate to speak up when you hear what sounds like jargon or you’d like an explanation of something we share in a lesson. The question you ask is likely on the minds of some of your colleagues too!

Hope to see you at Coworking on May 16^th

Stef, Julie, Gayle, Jeff, Farnaz, Mike

Digest: Cohort Call 03 [ 2024-epa ]

Openscapes_CohortCalls [ 2024-epa ] folder - contains agendas, recordings, pathways

https://openscapes.github.io/2024-epa/- cohort webpage

Goals: We discussed team culture and data strategies for future us.

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

• Have a Seaside Chat and continue work on your pathway, Trailhead & shifting to “Next Steps”, think about team culture & data strategies.
• (optional) Attend Coworking Thursday

Slide Decks:

• Psychological safety (slides)
• Data strategies for Future Us (slides)

A few lines from shared notes in the Agenda doc

• Team culture & psychological safety

  • Seaside Chat about GitHub got us all on the same page and ready to go forward
  • Important that Seaside Chats should have a goal/ agenda
  • Building trust; ppl come from different backgrounds and will make different contributions – don't shut them down, listen
  • 10 open ended questions - keep them near your view to practice
  • Asking questions: what could the EPA do here? And not constrain yourself to “do we have the money?” or “is it the EPA’s role”

• Data strategies

  • Every field study usually has a different combination of instruments, each with their own raw data format...a good chunk of time for every project is spent figuring out data import / reformatting functions. The time estimate on “data wrangling” seems right to me! Dealing with timestamps / time formats and aligning data with varying averaging or logging times internal to instruments is one of the biggest challenges. +1
  • I can see that this “tidy” data could be very useful in moving the analysis to code... I have the temptation to redo everything. I like the advice on starting these practices for new analysis. +1
  • I have some wrangling to do, but I’m not sure how to effectively do it using code.
  • Built in excel functions can give you a hint about what to put in R code. Like sorting, formatting a date - talking through this would be great for a Seaside Chat
  • Broman & Woo and Wilson et al papers that Aneese showed are great topics to look through together in Seaside Chats +1
  • It’s powerful to be able to have a published articles outlining issues like the time it takes to wrangle data
  • Missing data – how is it represented / dealt with? A huge topic
  • Need for data formatting uniformity for EPA ORD data. Is ScienceHub used by external parties? (data.gov is external face) - Gayle will follow up on whether this is being tracked. Jim noted it’s hard to find what you’re looking for