Summary from a brainstorming meeting about the project future

Screenshots and summary from our concept board.

On January 23, 2024, we held a meeting where we wanted to explore ideas for the future of the CodeRefinery project from team members and the community.

In most meetings only very few people speak and most participants don't say anything. We wanted to change this and tried to create a welcoming meeting environment with a facilitator who hopefully only facilitates and meeting participants where hopefully everybody gets the chance to contribute. We used a concept board and collected ideas visually (screenshots are below).

In this post we summarize our findings and lessons learned. If you only have 3 minutes, then read the summary (first section).

• Summary of ideas that were voted as most important
  • Needs
  • Wants
  • General suggestions for future meetings
• Meeting format and goals
• Timeline
• Concept boards where we explored what project members need and want from the project
• What we learned about the meeting format

Summary of ideas that were voted as most important

We provide more details in screenshots below. Here we only summarize the points that received votes answering the question: "which ideas are most important for you". The ideas are summarized here without being commented. They of course need to be followed-up somehow but this we will do in future meetings and events.

Needs

In your current position, what do you need in order to be able to contribute to the project 1 year from now (in terms of work time, financing, governance, administration, accounting, leadership, credit)?

Recognition and credit (12 votes combined):

• Strong publication or white paper about CR and its importance/benefits
• Recognition of our good teaching practices
• Collect and showcase where else our materials are used
• Formalize credit to outside contributors

Collaboration and experimentation (12 votes combined):

• Collaboration with passionate people who enjoy teaching
• Two-way learning
• More opportunities for future development
• Experiment beyond the usual tools workshop

Overlap with high-performance computing (6 votes):

• Subject overlap with skills and tools of relevance for HPC

Roadmap (6 votes combined):

• Statement how CodeRefinery fits into the FAIR ecosystem
• Concrete and public roadmap for the future

Administrative/financial needs (6 votes combined):

• Tasks that have a clear work-time estimation
• Cost projects also for in-kind work
• Home organization securing funding
• If outside regular job, then compensated for the work

Wants

What do you wish from the project in terms of lesson portfolio, format, and collaboration in order to still be around 1 year from now?

Topics and target audience (22 votes combined):

• Stronger integration with HPC - if CR should "belong" somewhere, it should be HPC
• New topics on AI and ML
• New training material topics"
• Think about new topics for training via discussion & collaboration
• Develop training material for GPU computing
• Programming lessons to go hand-in-hand with software engineering lessons
• Create new lessons based on needs and existing expertise
• Focus on academic users to make it more valuable to [academic] management
• Material suitable for the "phone generation"

Self-learning vs. real-time (11 votes combined):

• Self learning materials/courses/ asynchronous learning: some researchers don't have time for long workshops and don't wanna know all the details
• MOOC as basic service, interaction/teams delegated
• Collaboration on video material

External collaboration and conferences (5 votes combined):

• Stronger connection to other similar projects, like BSSW, INTERSECT, etc.
• Regular BoF sessions at conferences like ISC, SC, PyCon, JuliaCon, etc.
• Keep/improve connection to RSE community

Collaboration and co-hosting (5 votes combined):

• Course collaborations of courses that already exist, like currently done with Aalto HPC kickstart
• National course/workshop collaborations, offering in-person specialized short workshops
• Co-hosting of events, and co-developing of lessons

Social events and keeping up-to-date (5 votes combined):

• Social events where team members get an overview of activities in each partner organization (e.g. monthly "zoomffee")
• Easy way to follow what is going on and when to step in (something else than scrolling all chat)

Workshop format (5 votes combined):

• Smaller, shorter workshops
• Have more formalized possibility of using ready-made computing environment ("executable website")

Administration and governance (3 votes combined):

• Formalized and more official course request form, to show organizations (in and outside of CR) that this is "a thing"
• Mechanism/support for creating new "refineries" (HPC Refinery, AI Refinery, ...)
• Delegate non-profit side to DRA (for example)

Credit (3 votes):

• Official network of teachers, public on webpage, with skills

Workshop preparation (3 votes combined):

• Less lesson revision each workshop
• Up-to-date and maintained lessons

General suggestions for future meetings

• Restart monthly community chats around specific topics where one can get updates without reading all chat.
• Separate on-boarding meetings for friends and future instructors (community calls could be on-boarding meetings).
• More social media presence and dissemination.
• Create tasks forces or work packages so that others can help better and to have fewer bottlenecks in the project.

Meeting format and goals

To facilitate a meeting where we collect ideas from everybody but without judging them, we used a concept board and virtual sticky notes and divided the session into 3 parts:

• Start with everybody taking notes by themselves ("me"; for ourselves).
• Second step: formalize and place on concept board ("we"; randomized 1-1 pairs).
• Third step: we review and discuss as a group ("us"). Make sure that the facilitator understood what the group wanted.

13 persons participated in this meeting (one of them, the author of this blog post, was the facilitator):

Timeline

• 5 min: welcome and getting started
• 5 min: everyone adds themselves to the board
• 10 min "me" time: work on your own on the two boards below, without sharing your thoughts yet
• 15 min "we" time: 1-1 work with a randomized partner; put ideas on the board(s)
• 10 min "us" time: we cluster and organize
• 10 min: voting on which ideas are most important for you (everybody got 10 votes to distribute)
• follow-up: blog post summarizing this

Here is a screenshot from the session:

Concept boards where we explored what project members need and want from the project

Meeting participants were asked to answer two questions with sticky notes (sticky note color has no meaning):

• "Needs": In your current position, what do you need in order to be able to contribute to the project 1 year from now? (in terms of work time, financing, governance, administration, accounting, leadership, credit)
• "Wants": What do you wish from the project in terms of lesson portfolio, format, and collaboration in order to still be around 1 year from now?

We did not have enough time to cluster the notes better but to summarize the findings I have later manually clustered related votes and summed them up.

The comment note that is outside that screenshot to the bottom and looks a bit cut off says: "I agree with this a way that CR should have a more defined brand - be it HPC or something else".

Below we list the ideas also in text format.

• Needs: In your current position, what do you need in order to be able to contribute to the project 1 year from now? (in terms of work time, financing, governance, administration, accounting, leadership, credit)

  • Company internal cost object for in-kind contribution
  • Staff in my own project that are interested in working on CR
  • A project in my organisation  that somehow includes CR
  • Official statement of how CR fits in the ecosystem of FAIR X, to help convincing management if they say "we do already Y"
  • collaborations with different people on varied topic for training and workshop, and also seeking more opportunities for future development
  • Measurable benefit to Aalto (continued enrollment numbers)
  • formalize contribution to the outside (credit to contributors)
  • Subject overlap with skills and tools of relevance for HPC
  • HPC connection
  • Possibility to allocate (more) worktime for this
  • "cost object" either via project funding or formalized "in-kind"
  • Collaboration with passionate people who enjoys delivering, two way learning
  • "Project" that includes CR as a job
  • a strong publication or white paper about CR and its importance/benefits
  • Plans for the future public and concrete, roadmap
  • Tasks that have clear work-time estimations
  • UPPMAX & NAISS provide in-kind support: this has worked really well up to now, but it is dependent on the home organization to have a secure funding
  • (this is a need/want) New content? New formats? Experiment beyond the usual tools workshop
  • If outside regular job then some other compensation for my time
  • Permission from supervisor
  • possibility to join as "oneself",without organization that is "part of CR"
  • collect and showcase where else than within the CR project, the materials are used -> show benfit, visibility to employer
  • Recognition of our good teaching practices

• Wants: What do you wish from the project in terms of lesson portfolio, format, and collaboration in order to still be around 1 year from now?

  • UPPMAX & NAISS perspective: In terms of collaboration, the fact that this is a collaboration among people from several supercomputing centers makes it more valuable / "sells" better to higher ups. That is not to exclude industry, but main target audience for us/UPPMAX is academic users.
  • More frequent social events eg. monthly zoomffee / networking events
  • thinking more topics for training via discussion & collaboration
  • Self learning materials/courses/ asynchronous learning: some researchers don't have time for long workshops and don't wanna know all the details
  • social events where team members get an overview of activities in  each partner organization
  • CR MOOC as basic service, interaction/teams delegated
  • smaller shorter workshops
  • New training material topics
  • Have "phone generation" suitable materials , eg IQM academy style
  • National course/workshop collaborations, offering in -person specialized short workshops
  • more in-person teaching
  • New topics on AI and ML can be added to CR lesson portfolio
  • official network of teachers, public on webpage, with skills
  • stronger integration with HPC - if CR should "belong" somewhere, it should be HPC
  • UPPMAX & NAISS perspective: In terms of lessons, the base workshop is great. I think new lessons should be created in terms of needs and existing/wish-for expertise. CR has enabled collaboration on additional courses that are complimentary to the ones of the home institution - added value.
  • co-organizing events
  • course collaborations of courses that already exiost, like currently done with Aalto HPC kcikstart
  • formalized and more official course request form, to show organizations (in and outside of CR) that this is "a thing"
  • Have more formalized possibility of using readymade computing environment "executable website"
  • regular BoF sessions at conferences like ISC, SC, PyCon, JuliaCon, etc
  • programming lessons to go hand-in-hand with software engineering lessons
  • Co-hosting of events, and co-developing of lessons, with PDC/NAISS
  • mechanism/support for creating new "refineries" (HPC Refinery, AI Refinery, ...)
  • Develop training material for GPU computing
  • volunteer instructors for CR and instructor training workshops
  • Easy way to follow what is going on and when to step in. (Something else than scrolling all chat)
  • stronger connection to other similar projects, like BSSW, INTERSECT, etc
  • UPPMAX & NAISS perspective: As for the format, in my opinion going even larger in attendance would imply using a platform like LinkedIn or similar. But it does require additional effort, at least in the setup phase. This would allow for asyncrohonous learning. The danger I see with it is that it may not be appealing for the home institution.
  • maintenance and further development of sphinx-lesson
  • Collaborators on video-material (should we choose to make some)
  • collaboration & flexibility, promote two way learning
  • Connection to RSE community somehow
  • Delegate nonprofit side to DRA (for example)
  • Denmark could use with another CR person
  • Less lesson revision each workshop
  • up-to-date and maintained lessons

What we learned about the meeting format

The format felt like the right choice. However we noted few suggestions for how we can improve such meetings in future:

• Allocate 1.5 hours instead of 1 hour.
• Add a break so that facilitator can organize boards to make it easier for all.
• Add example sticky notes.
• Suggest to make text short (some sticky notes contained too many words and were possibly not read during the 5 minute voting session).