summary blog post from yesterday's session

content/blog/2024-01-24-project-future-concept-board.md

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+title = "Summary from a brainstorming meeting about the project future"
+slug = "2024/01/24/project-future-concept-board"
+
+[extra]
+authors = "Radovan Bast"
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+
+On January 23, 2024, we held a meeting where we wanted to explore **ideas for
+the future of the CodeRefinery project** from team members and the community.
+
+In most meetings only very few people speak and most participants don't say
+anything.  We wanted to change this and tried to create a welcoming meeting
+environment with a facilitator who hopefully only facilitates and meeting
+participants where hopefully everybody gets the chance to contribute. We used a
+concept board and collected ideas visually (screenshots are below).
+
+In this post we summarize our findings and lessons learned. If you only have 3
+minutes, then read the summary (first section).
+
+
+<!-- toc -->
+
+
+## Summary of ideas that were voted as most important
+
+We provide more details in screenshots below. Here we only summarize the points
+that received the most votes answering the question: "which ideas are most
+important for you".  The ideas are summarized here without being commented.
+They of course need to be followed-up somehow but this we will do in future
+meetings and events.
+
+
+### Needs
+
+In your current position, what do you need in order to be able to contribute to
+the project 1 year from now (in terms of work time, financing, governance,
+administration, accounting, leadership, credit)?
+
+**Recognition and credit** (12 votes combined):
+- Strong publication or white paper about CR and its importance/benefits
+- Recognition of our good teaching practices
+- Collect and showcase where else our materials are used
+- Formalize credit to outside contributors
+
+**Collaboration and experimentation** (12 votes combined):
+- Collaboration with passionate people who enjoy teaching
+- Two-way learning
+- More opportunities for future development
+- Experiment beyond the usual tools workshop
+
+**Overlap with high-performance computing** (6 votes):
+- Subject overlap with skills and tools of relevance for HPC
+
+**Roadmap** (6 votes combined):
+- Statement how CodeRefinery fits into the FAIR ecosystem
+- Concrete and public roadmap for the future
+
+**Administrative/financial needs** (6 votes combined):
+- Tasks that have a clear work-time estimation
+- Cost projects also for in-kind work
+- Home organization securing funding
+- If outside regular job, then compensated for the work
+
+
+### Wants
+
+What do you wish from the project in terms of lesson portfolio, format, and
+collaboration in order to still be around 1 year from now?
+
+**Topics and target audience** (22 votes combined):
+- Stronger integration with HPC - if CR should "belong" somewhere, it should be HPC
+- New topics on AI and ML
+- New training material topics"
+- Think about new topics for training via discussion & collaboration
+- Develop training material for GPU computing
+- Programming lessons to go hand-in-hand with software engineering lessons
+- Create new lessons based on needs and existing expertise
+- Focus on academic users to make it more valuable to [academic] management
+- Material suitable for the "phone generation"
+
+**Self-learning vs. real-time** (11 votes combined):
+- Self learning materials/courses/ asynchronous learning: some researchers
+  don't have time for long workshops and don't wanna know all the details
+- MOOC as basic service, interaction/teams delegated
+- Collaboration on video material
+
+**External collaboration and conferences** (5 votes combined):
+- Stronger connection to other similar projects, like BSSW, INTERSECT, etc.
+- Regular BoF sessions at conferences like ISC, SC, PyCon, JuliaCon, etc.
+- Keep/improve connection to RSE community
+
+**Collaboration and co-hosting** (5 votes combined):
+- Course collaborations of courses that already exist, like currently done with Aalto HPC kickstart
+- National course/workshop collaborations, offering in-person specialized short workshops
+- Co-hosting of events, and co-developing of lessons
+
+**Social events and keeping up-to-date** (5 votes combined):
+- Social events where team members get an overview of activities in each partner organization (e.g. monthly "zoomffee")
+- Easy way to follow what is going on and when to step in (something else than scrolling all chat)
+
+**Workshop format** (5 votes combined):
+- Smaller, shorter workshops
+- Have more formalized possibility of using ready-made computing environment ("executable website")
+
+**Administration and governance** (3 votes combined):
+- Formalized and more official course request form, to show organizations (in
+  and outside of CR) that this is "a thing"
+- Mechanism/support for creating new "refineries" (HPC Refinery, AI Refinery, ...)
+- Delegate non-profit side to DRA (for example)
+
+**Credit** (3 votes):
+- Official network of teachers, public on webpage, with skills
+
+**Workshop preparation** (3 votes combined):
+- Less lesson revision each workshop
+- Up-to-date and maintained lessons
+
+
+### General suggestions for future meetings
+
+- Restart monthly community chats around specific topics where one can get
+  updates without reading all chat.
+- Separate on-boarding meetings for friends and future instructors (community
+  calls could be on-boarding meetings).
+- More social media presence and dissemination.
+- Create tasks forces or work packages so that others can help better and to
+  have fewer bottlenecks in the project.
+
+---
+
+## Meeting format and goals
+
+To facilitate a meeting where we collect ideas from everybody but without
+judging them, we used a concept board and virtual sticky notes and divided the
+session into 3 parts:
+- Start with everybody taking notes by themselves ("me"; for ourselves).
+- Second step: formalize and place on concept board ("we"; randomized 1-1
+  pairs).
+- Third step: we review and discuss as a group ("us"). Make sure that the
+  facilitator understood what the group wanted.
+
+13 persons participated in this meeting (one of them, the author of this blog
+post, was the facilitator):
+<img width="100%" src="/blog/project-future-concept-board/participants.jpg" alt="screenshot of sticky notes with participant names">
+
+
+## Timeline
+
+- 5 min: welcome and getting started
+- 5 min: everyone adds themselves to the board
+- 10 min "me" time: work on your own on the two boards below, without sharing your thoughts yet
+- 15 min "we" time: 1-1 work with a randomized partner; put ideas on the board(s)
+- 10 min "us" time: we cluster and organize
+- 10 min: voting on which ideas are most important for you (everybody got 10 votes to distribute)
+- follow-up: blog post summarizing this
+
+Here is a screenshot from the session:
+<img width="100%" src="/blog/project-future-concept-board/timeline.jpg" alt="screenshot of the meeting timeline and meeting suggestions">
+
+
+## Concept boards where we explored what project members need and want from the project
+
+Meeting participants were asked to answer two questions with sticky notes
+(sticky note color has no meaning):
+- **"Needs"**: In your current position, what do you need in order to be able
+  to contribute to the project 1 year from now? (in terms of work time,
+  financing, governance, administration, accounting, leadership, credit)
+- **"Wants"**: What do you wish from the project in terms of lesson portfolio,
+  format, and collaboration in order to still be around 1 year from now?
+
+We did not have enough time to cluster the notes better but to summarize the
+findings I have later manually clustered related votes and summed them up.
+
+<img width="100%" src="/blog/project-future-concept-board/vote.jpg" alt="screenshot of the sticky notes with ideas and number of votes">
+
+The comment note that is outside that screenshot to the bottom and looks a bit
+cut off says:
+"I agree with this a way that CR should have a more defined brand - be it HPC or something else".
+
+Below we list the ideas also in text format.
+
+- "**Needs**": In your current position, what do you need in order to be able to contribute to the project 1 year from now? (in terms of work time, financing, governance, administration, accounting, leadership, credit)"
+  - "Company internal cost object for in-kind contribution"
+  - "Staff in my own project that are interested in working on CR"
+  - "A project in my organisation  that somehow includes CR"
+  - "Official statement of how CR fits in the ecosystem of FAIR X, to help convincing management if they say ""we doa lready Y"""
+  - "collaborations with different people on varied topic for training and workshop, and also seeking more opportunities for future development"
+  - "Measurable benefit to Aalto (continued enrollment numbers)"
+  - "formalize contribution to the outside (credit to contributors)"
+  - "Subject overlap with skills and tools of relevance for HPC"
+  - "HPC connection"
+  - "person"
+  - "Possibility to allocate (more) worktime for this"
+  - """cost object"" either via project funding or formalized ""in-kind"""
+  - "Collaboration with passionate people who enjoys delivering, two way learning"
+  - """Project"" that includes CR as a job"
+  - "a strong publication or white paper about CR and its importance/benefits"
+  - "Plans for the future public and concrete, roadmap"
+  - "Tasks that have clear work-time estimations"
+  - "UPPMAX & NAISS provide in-kind support: this has worked really well up to now, but it is dependent on the home organization to have a secure funding"
+  - "(this is a need/want) New content? New formats? Experiment beyond the usual tools workshop"
+  - "If outside regular job then some other compensation for my time"
+  - "Permission from supervisor"
+  - "possibility to join as ""oneself"",without organization that is ""part of CR"""
+  - "collect and showcase where else than within the CR project, the materials are used -> show benfit, visibility to employer"
+  - "Recognition of our good teaching practices"
+
+- "**Wants**": What do you wish from the project in terms of lesson portfolio, format, and collaboration in order to still be around 1 year from now?"
+  - "UPPMAX & NAISS perspective: In terms of collaboration, the fact that this is a collaboration among people from several supercomputing centers makes it more valuable / ""sells"" better to higher ups. That is not to exclude industry, but main target audience for us/UPPMAX is academic users."
+  - "More frequent social events eg. monthly zoomffee / networking events"
+  - "thinking more topics for training via discussion  & collaboration"
+  - "Self learning materials/courses/ asynchronous learning: some researchers don't have time for long workshops and don't wanna know all the details"
+  - "social events where team members get an overview of activities in  each partner organization"
+  - "CR MOOC as basic service, interaction/teams delegated"
+  - "smaller shorter  workshops"
+  - "New training material topics"
+  - "Have ""phone generation"" suitable materials , eg IQM academy style"
+  - "National course/workshop collaborations, offering in -person specialized short workshops"
+  - "more in-person teaching"
+  - "New topics on AI and ML can be added to CR lesson portfolio"
+  - "official network of teachers, public on webpage, with skills"
+  - "stronger integration with HPC - if CR should ""belong"" somewhere, it should be HPC"
+  - "UPPMAX & NAISS perspective: In terms of lessons, the base workshop is great. I think new lessons should be created in terms of needs and existing/wish-for expertise. CR has enabled collaboration on additional courses that are complimentary to the ones of the home institution - added value."
+  - "co-organizing events"
+  - "course collaborations of courses that already exiost, like currently done with Aalto HPC kcikstart"
+  - "formalized and more official course request form, to show organizations (in and outside of CR) that this is ""a thing"""
+  - "Have more formalized possibility of using readymade computing environment ""executable website"""
+  - "regular BoF sessions at conferences like ISC, SC, PyCon, JuliaCon, etc"
+  - "programming lessons to go hand-in-hand with software engineering lessons"
+  - "Co-hosting of events, and co-developing of lessons, with PDC/NAISS"
+  - "mechanism/support for creating new ""refineries"" (HPC Refinery, AI Refinery, ...)"
+  - "Develop training material for GPU computing"
+  - "volunteer instructors for CR and instructor training workshops"
+  - "Easy way to follow what is going on and when to step in. (Something else than scrolling all chat)"
+  - "stronger connection to other similar projects, like BSSW, INTERSECT, etc"
+  - "UPPMAX & NAISS perspective: As for the format, in my opinion going even larger in attendance would imply using a platform like LinkedIn or similar. But it does require additional effort, at least in the setup phase. This would allow for asyncrohonous learning. The danger I see with it is that it may not be appealing for the home institution."
+  - "maintenance and further development of sphinx-lesson"
+  - "Collaborators on video-material (should we choose to make some)"
+  - "collaboration & flexibility, promote two way learning"
+  - "Connection to RSE community somehow"
+  - "Delegate nonprofit side to DRA (for example)"
+  - "Denmark could use with another CR person"
+  - "Less lesson revision each workshop"
+  - "up-to-date and maintained lessons"
+
+
+## What we learned about the meeting format
+
+The format felt like the right choice. However we noted few suggestions
+for how we can improve such meetings in future:
+- Allocate 1.5 hours instead of 1 hour.
+- Add a break so that facilitator can organize boards to make it easier for all.
+- Add example sticky notes.
+- Suggest to make text short (some sticky notes contained too many words and
+  were possibly not read during the 5 minute voting session).

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