Personal Thoughts on Collaboration and Long-Term Project Planning

Our opinions can change over time, and some long-term effects may not be noticeable until 5+ years of experience.

While I still don't think I have everything figured out, I am using this page to organize my thoughts on some topics that may be of use to the broader community.  I also hope that the update/change logs may also be helpful for giving credit to feedback from others during discussions.

Nevertheless, for these posts, I am going to try and focus on what I believe I understand most clearly:

• Post-Publication Review
• Staff in Shared Resources
• Long-Term Maintenance / Support
• Code / Data Sharing 

Again, it is probably a little early for me to be giving advice (since I don't have a solution worked out for myself yet), but I hope sharing my experiences can be helpful to other people as I sort out the details for figuring out a sustainable workload for myself.  Having the patience to work on agreed processes step-by-step is also important, but I believe some of this information may be important for future changes (even if they don't occur in the immediate future).

To be clear, I very much enjoy working with collaborators as a Bioinformatics Specialist in a Core Facility.  So, while some of what I am saying indicates room for future improvement, I have an overall positive impression of my work environment and the researchers that I have worked with (who are passionate about helping other people).

Plus, even though I think some of this content is important for long-term discussions, I also want to emphasize that you can be genuinely proud for putting in your best effort to help people and there is some need for short-term support (such as a temporary difficulty in getting additional funding) or at least giving people the chance to think carefully about whether a more major transition is necessary.

Update Log:

7/26/2019 - public post date
7/29/2019 - trim down introductory paragraph
7/30/2019 - add link for maintenance / support, and modify preceding sentence
8/4/2019 - minor edit after some proofreading by a family member
8/6/2019 - minor changes
4/30/2020 - add link to code / data sharing details (either required or suggested)