- Collect and review weekly reports
- Periodically reach out to researchers that may be falling behind in work/weekly logs and encourage collaboration between researchers to share ideas and results
- Tag computational advisors as appropriate to review researcher results from weekly logs or ad hoc result-sharing
- Attend bi-weekly meetings
As a PM, since the project is in an open-ended exploratory state without fine-grained goals or publication deadlines, I am approaching this from a researcher development angle in service of the broader goal. Dr. Porto gave the researchers the target of formulating an individual research proposal so that each can work on an area for the rest of the semester, and I have been working on helping the researchers communicate with/get the resources/foster the collaboration needed to help them formulate these proposals and ultimately projects. Once those are submitted later this week, I want to involve the computational advisors as much as possible so that each researcher can share their research projects that have gotten a lot of solid feedback.
I have enjoyed seeing one of the new researchers take on the project with enthusiasm and rigor, submitting weekly reports in a timely manner with great detail and artifacts that I am able to tag the advisors for for advanced review, and generally exploring really interesting ideas. Dr. Porto also is present to offer light feedback in the Slack. I have tried to encourage communication over Slack and this researcher has been very communicative on Slack when sharing results. Additionally, when the senior researcher does have availability to conduct office hours (done twice this semester thus far), the junior researchers enjoy being able to bounce off ideas and get guidance.
The biggest challenge has been getting the other researchers to more actively participate in the project. The senior researcher has not been very communicative in the channel and has not submitted any time logs on Slack, so the junior researchers have not had visibility into their results, and have expressed that they weren't sure what he was working on until this past week (week 8). The other researcher is a volunteer and while I have encouraged knowledge sharing between the researchers to help guide them and help get them set up, the volunteer researcher has been quite busy with their primary project and have not been able to make much progress at all with this project. Additionally, the computational advisors occasionally chime in when I tag them, but more active feedback would likely benefit the researchers.
There has also been very little adoption of the GitHub task management thus far, but I think it is because there has not been much activity aside from the active junior researcher.
During biweekly meetings when everyone tends to be most engaged, Dr. Porto/the researchers go over their progress/what they need access to and he/senior researcher will offer prospective tasks for the researchers to pursue. My goal is to ensure that those tasks are clear and that I help the researchers get feedback from the computational advisors, and form collaborative hours if their schedule permits. I also like to react with emojis for time logs and results that are shared in the channel to offer positive reinforcement for actively contributing in the chat, and will reach out in the DMs as appropriate to check in to see if they need help with anything.
Initially I requested and received some feedback about using an alternative project management task tracking tool from Slack to Notion/GitHub, so those changes were made. However, since adoption of those tools has been low, and there has primarily been one researcher that is active in the chat, I have shifted toward focusing on assisting each researcher in getting what they need from peers/comp advisors feedback/development-wise, and in meetings I have gotten some positive notes.
I will also try to collect some data from the project team after we review their individual project proposals for the research project to formally assess where they can use additional support from me. I also have observed that the junior researchers enjoy when they have collaborative office hours--I think finding a way to make that more frequent or an open forum where it's not only bottlenecked by the availability of one senior researcher would help progress further, especially when I observed a recent meeting where it was just the researchers with me in the background (to clarify, I don't tend to attend those meetings nor do I believe I need to in the future--it was just a repurposed biweekly meeting). I also would like to gradually reintroduce the use of the GitHub task tracker. Once the individual project proposals are shared with the team, then I think we can try to leverage that more.
Given the participation levels and current time logging by the researchers, I think there needs to be a stronger incentive to submit the time logs because it has been very difficult to receive time logs outside of the one actively participating researcher. I have offered reminders in channel, DMs and in the bi-weekly meetings but have been unable to obtain them in many cases. Having more guidance on how to integrate the GitHub task tracking to encourage researcher adoption would be helpful as well.