Converting workshop material into paper.

[gvwilson]

1. Create LaTeX.
2. Organize along "departmental" lines.

[gonuke]

(I wasn't involved in the workshop [sadly], so not sure if I was invited to comment here intentionally or accidentally, and my comment is therefore not based on knowledge of the workshop conversation.)

There may be value in how hierarchical leadership structures from outside a project are superimposed onto a software project. For example, when my students and I all participate in a project, the leadership structure of our academic environment influences (but doesn't define!) the authority with which we all participate in the project.

[larnsce]

Thanks for inviting me to review this exciting paper, @gvwilson. I will provide my comments along the sections below, but I like the overall order. It starts very practical and then gets into detail with specific advice. The Appendixes are highly useful and deserve the paper the tree has made to let me print them on a poster for our office corridor.

What is a Project

• In the workshop this shows up in Mechanics and I value the slides 5 to 9 a lot: https://codebender.org/mechanics/#5
• I think the paper would benefit from a section that includes this

How to think about your new role

• "Recalibrate your sensors" - I will turn this into a poster and put it up on my wall!
• I like how the roles/departments turn into the outline of the paper. The Finance Department currently doesn't show up in the outline and I suggest also adding Governance to make it complete.

Project Management

• What I am missing here are the projects where there would be a mix of people that write code and those that write the narrative, for example, as part of a journal paper.
  • The social scientists that contribute to the research projects that I work with largely do qualitative research without computational work.
  • Understandably, they do not see the point of using version control and using issues for shared to-do lists for writing a manuscript that combines quantitative computational analysis (e.g. air quality sensor data) with their work (thematic analysis of focus group discussions)
  • We end up with a mess of proprietary file formats scattered across different locations and additional project and task management tools that aren't really helping us either.
  • While it's my job to solve that problem, I would love to see it addressed in this section

Time

• This section is so brilliant and I will reference and share it any time that I have a discussion about working hours.
• What I think could add value here is to highlight that this is also the case in academia.
• I often hear statements like "You cannot get your PhD if you don't work 60 hours/week." or "I do not understand how a woman can have a family and be a professor." (which highlights several issues)
• My experience is also that the higher the rank, the less you need to report on time tracking. First, it's "hours you worked", then it's "tracking absences", and finally "nothing to track". Tenure track and tenured professors do not even need to track when they take their vacation. What does that lead to? People won't take time off and set bad examples.

Sales

• Fantastic line! https://github.com/gvwilson/codebender/blob/paper/mrsp.tex#L526