Blogs

Black lives matter

June 15, 2020

Over the past weeks, protests throughout the US and around the world have been calling out systemic, anti-Black racism and calling for justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others. Our country is facing a reckoning and we need to take individual and collective action to fight for justice and anti-racism. I have been slow to speak out, focused on listening and learning and understanding my role in systemic anti-Black racism, including in academia and environmental science and data science.

Developing reproducible workflows collaboratively

By Julien Brun, Julie Lowndes, Carrie Kappel in community

May 29, 2020

Crossposted at NCEAS The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) funds Working Groups of 15-20 scientists from across disciplines and sectors to collaborate on environmental synthesis science projects. In this time of pandemic, groups that would typically be meeting in person four times over ~two years are now faced with launching their projects virtually. NCEAS is providing training and support to help those teams kickstart their research collaborations remotely, and Openscapes was heavily involved in designing and leading the two remote learning modules.

Kick-starting scientific collaborations remotely

By Julie Lowndes, Carrie Kappel, Julien Brun in community

May 4, 2020

“I was blown away at how effectively and productively you’ve led a virtual meeting – and I’m in a lot these days. People can be pretty passive”. This quote from a participant really captures what we were hoping to achieve in our first remote support module, “Efficient virtual collaboration & facilitation for synthesis science.” We wanted to not only discuss strategies for efficient collaboration and engage participants hands-on, but also model the behavior we were teaching.

Our Openscapes experience: The Fay Lab

By Ashleigh Novak in community

March 31, 2020

Ashleigh Novak is a spatial ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science & Technology (SMAST), focused on integrating tagging data into stock assessments that inform fisheries management. As a technical associate with the Fay Lab, Ashleigh participated at our first in-person Openscapes Workshop at NOAA NEFSC in February 2020 and shares her experiences here. She notes below that “given the current, global situation of transitioning to at-home research, our lab is leaning on many of the tools and skills learned from Openscapes.

How to run a remote workshop, Openscapes/Open Leaders-style

By Julie Lowndes in community

March 11, 2020

Here is some tips about how to run remote workshops like we do in Openscapes, which was modeled after Mozilla Open Leaders program. This post was sparked by a question on Twitter asking for ideas/suggestions on virtual workshops, and is really one I meant to write a long time ago. I’ve structured it with practical guidance for remote workshops and small remote meetings, with more details and examples from Openscapes remote and mixed events as you continue reading.

Our first Openscapes Workshop

By Julie Lowndes in community

March 6, 2020

Last week Openscapes had its first-ever in-person 2-day workshop (the Champions Program is remote-by-design so this was an in-person adaptation). The workshop was at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with six teams of fisheries scientists from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science & Technology (SMAST). It was really wonderful to meet and work with these thoughtful scientists in person, and to see them leave the workshop energized to strengthen teamwork and community-based learning around open data science.

rOpenSci's leadership in #rstats culture

By Julie Lowndes in community

February 21, 2020

Cross-posted on rOpenSci At their closing keynote at the 2020 RStudio Conference, Hilary Parker and Roger Peng mentioned that they hatched the idea for their excellent Not So Standard Deviations podcast following their reunion at the 2015 rOpenSci unconf, (“runconf15”). That statement went straight to my heart because it pin-pointed how I had been feeling throughout the week of RStudio Conference that I had been unable to name. At rstudio::conf, I was surrounded by so many of the incredible people I had met at that very same runconf15.

R for Excel Users Workshop

By Allison Horst and Julie Lowndes in community

February 18, 2020

tl;dr: all workshop materials are available here: GitHub: https://github.com/rstudio-conf-2020/r-for-excel Book: https://rstudio-conf-2020.github.io/r-for-excel/ Slides Cross posted: https://education.rstudio.com/blog/2020/02/conf20-r-excel/ License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Background We were thrilled to co-teach the R for Excel Users workshop at rstudio::conf(2020)! From early on in our weekly early-morning work sessions and brainstorming hikes, we knew that our R for Excel Users workshop would not be about wholesale translating Excel operations into R. Instead, it would be a more holistic approach to reproducible analyses with R – a friendly introduction to becoming a modern R user.

RStudio Conference 2020

By Julie Lowndes in community

February 4, 2020

Last week Openscapes went to the RStudio Conference! This is a brief summary of a conference that truly made history, both globally as RStudio announced it is a Public Benefit Corporation, and personally for me, since it marked five years of being part of the #rstats community. It is brief (and does not begin to provide a full summary!), but will be complemented by forthcoming blogs. Art played a big role at the conference.

How we work: the Buckley Lab

By Lauren Buckley in community

January 16, 2020

Dr. Lauren Buckley spent her fall sabbatical at NCEAS, where she chatted with Julie Lowndes about her lab practices and open data science. Here she shares how she is using practices from Openscapes in her own research group at the University of Washington. Learn more about her research at faculty.washington.edu/lbuckley. Thermal art of the Getty Museum by one of Dr. Buckley’s research initiatives @trenchproject.