Requirements Gathering

Collecting what people need in order to organize scientific and academic work!

Problems people face

Scratch notes section, merge down into themes as we go

(Reorganize above notes into themes)

How do we find and make sense of the information?

"there is no centralized document"
Storing everything in google drive
- Handling people coming and going, permissions and access
The data is a jumble
- No annotations - not sure what any of this data is
Buy In - how to get people to use something so that a) they think of it as the place to look for information and b) they think of it as the place to put information.
- integrate with existing systems, especially when required to use them

How to we get information to new people?

Implicit knowledge held within the people in the lab passed down hand to hand
- Training is implicit and informal
- Handoffs don't happen - received an empty notes document

How do we use information together?

How do we control who can use and change the information?

Everyone has their own systems -- even within the same lab
Platform juggling - too many platforms that don't talk to one another.
Access control within institutions.
- e.g. medical school Box can't be accessed from different places - google drive can just be accessed anywhere
- Especially between institutions this is an issue.
Depositing
- Need to redo all our work to make it fit into the shape of the repository that needs to be deposited in - e.g. OSF
Need to be be able to flip between public and private in relatively fine scales
- e.g. public protocol, my lab's protocol, shared with collaborators, etc.

How does information change?

Heroic Experiments
- point of pride - "if i didn't show up then everything would stop"
- No Reward Mechanisms for doing support work - "you don't get a grant for having an organized lab"
Reinventing the wheel
- New projects are scattered across different system
- Need long-lasting and durable information systems that can survive mutation and change
Credit assignment
- Want to get credit for the work that is done, even if it's admin
- Don't want to get stuck behind a google sheet all day - just starting out and will all the admin work stay stacked on me when we start gathering other workers in the lab, and then because there is so much admin work to do, will i have to keep doing it?
Means of surfacing Protocol Drift
- Someone drifts and does their own thing after awhile, need some way of surfacing when one understanding of something differs from another.
- Print out a protocol, use the protocol, find some improvement to the protocol, but how would you then update the original document to accumulate improvements?
- Regulated documents - e.g. regulated by an animal protocol, can't just freely change, but need some mechanism to do updates that is clear.