Open Science meeting Week 1 - How can we improve skills in creating streamlined and collaborative workflow in a way that is useful to Size Ecology Group

[cottrellr]

After the first meeting for the Open Science Plan (18/5/22) and reading Lowndes et al 2017 "Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools", we reviewed how the journey of improved collaboration, more efficient communication, and training described experience by those working on the Ocean Health Index could be applied to our setting in the Size Ecology Group (given we not all necessarily working on the same project).

The main consensus was that developing a continuously updated lab book for our group could work really well. The idea of the lab book is to:

• State the principles, motivation, and values for Size Ecology Group
• Create a reference file for housekeeping - where are different data that the lab shares stored and managed e.g. meeting notes, schedules and recordings; FAQs for new members joining the lab
• Provide a centralised resource that shares methods and code for how to perform operations that all members of the lab may need or find useful throughout their work e.g., intros to Git, Github, and repository organisation; data synthesis; working with spatial data; fitting size spectra to phytoplankton data (if that is a thing?? - see a centralised place for shared tools is needed!)

The next meeting is discussing how we store, manage and back up data to make sure we are happy with the approaches we have now. But the aim is for different weeks - to start to build the lab book through creating values and convention that we all agree on.