1 Overview
There are no universal benchmarks for how quickly a synthesis working group will proceed through the phases of a project’s lifecycle. That said, the milestones below may prove helpful as a general ‘how are we doing?’ temperature check. If your group does not accomplish all of these–or proceeds beyond them–don’t worry too much!
2 Week 1 Benchmarks
Before arriving for the in-person component of the first week, you should have:
- Installed all necessary software
- See the “Workshop Preparation” section of the week 1 homepage
- Made a profile on github.com
After the first week, your group should have done (at least some of) the following:
- Defined the project’s primary hypothesis
- Discussed and created formal documentation for:
- Intellectual credit
- Group interpersonal norms (e.g., code of conduct, distribution of administrative/logistical tasks)
- Identified (A) specific datasets relevant to the project and/or (B) data repositories likely to contain such data
- Drafted a project management plan with specific, actionable tasks for getting started on the project
- Begun collaborating (in GitHub) on code to harmonize, do quality control on, visualize, or perform preliminary analysis on relevant data
- Discussed the above actions with your project mentor(s)
Between the first and second weeks of the workshop, your group should have done (at least some of) the following:
- Written code (version-controlled and stored in GitHub) to:
- Harmonize at least 5 datasets
- Perform quality control on the harmonized dataset
- Perform preliminary visualization of individual or synthesized datasets
- Documented scientific judgement calls made up to this point in a clear, human-readable manner
- E.g., data in/exclusion criteria, data transformation(s), project question or scope changes
- Updated your project management system with specific, actionable tasks that have not yet been done but need to be completed in the near future
- Identified areas of confusion (e.g., scientific, code-related) to discuss with workshop instructors and/or project mentors during week 2