2017-08-17 Meeting notes - JGI data science progress check in

• Determine who will collate all suggestions and finalise survey before sending out to the JGI.

• Michael will finalise the survey.
• Kjiersten will provide support and encouragement for Michael, Bill and Simona

• Finalise the goals of the survey.
• This will provide a reference point when discussing and finalising the questions.

Initial goals from google doc

• Give people data skills they think they need

• Accelerate learning; well defined paths for improvement and adding skills

• Determine the data problems we are trying to solve to figure out curriculum needed

• If on line courses, establish milestones

• Structure around JGI organizational goals

• Increase internal collaboration

Discussion

• Some way for tracking organisation goals and problems that people want to work on.
• Connect learning process back to something tractable and something they can work on.
• How can people get help for problems they want to work on. For example Bill is going to google.

• Where do people currently get help from?

• People are using different tools around the JGI.

Additional goals

• A defined path for getting help and support for data science problems.
• Adoption of a common analysis environment and set of tools for JGI.

• Conduct a pre-mortem on the data science survey before sending out.

• People are confused by the questions. Questions might be obvious to us but not to respondents.
• Too much work to fill out the survey, people are busy and don't have time to fill it in.
• People get a lot of emails and might miss the survey.
• People don't think the survey is useful, and it's just another distraction.
• People aren't motivated enough to spend the time learning the new skills. Won't dedicate the time to it.
• People will have other work priorities over learning new data science skills.

• Rank the problems identified in the pre-mortem
• List possible solutions

People are too busy to fill out questionnaire.

• Move the simpler questions to the top, the data science skills section is first. It takes less time to fill out. More people will start by filling out the multiple choice questions.

Questions are confusing

• Pick 5-10 ask to take a look at the survey before we send it out. Get any feedback on points that are confusing for them. Pick a range of people across the JGI to follow up with first.

People will have other work priorities / won't follow through

• Make the projects that people train and learn with impactful for their own work. Dovetail with the existing work they are already doing.
• Finding and creating teams that can work and learn well together.
• Pick topics that are most relevant to the JGI and what we're doing.
• Added an extra question about what possible problems might prevent them from learning new skills?

• Finalise follow up action items
• Determine who will take follow up steps to finish the survey

• Added action items at end