Month: August 2018

Lilli Goat Ruff

Landed in NZ… first time in absolute ages…. I had some hours between landing in Auckland and flying up to my place in Northland, so went to see my buddy Pete. Pete seems to attract animals…he and Debs have had pet chickens, cats, blackbirds, mynah birds, and now a goat… Pete rescued Lilli from the neighbors…so we went for a walk..

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…and of course, went to a cafe and got some smoothies…

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Pete is thinking of changing his last name to Ruff (long and true story) which means Lilli could be known as Lilli Goat Ruff 🙂

Then I flew north, landing at Kerikeri airport. My car has been parked there since I flew out, and I remember I went for a surf just before I parked the car there to fly out to San Francisco. As it happens, yesterday the car park minders saw me coming across the tarmac and met me at the door with my wet suit which they had dried out for me 🙂 .. I had been away for 5 months… Northland… awesome…

…and when I got home as always there was a pile of surprises in the mail that I had sent home while traveling but forgotten about, or that friends had sent… including this awesome book from friends at Times Up in Linz (Austria)..

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I have collaborated with them several times over the years. I love the people and their work… they asked me to write a small piece for their book which made it in 🙂

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..and also in the post some PubSweet badges I ordered…

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..and of course…the view…

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Great to be back.

Rethinking Workflow

I spent an awesome session at UCP with Dan Morgan and Alison O’Connell discussing workflow. We were working through ideas of Journal workflows and how they would be encapsulated in a single system, namely xpub-collabra. It was a super interesting discussion and I think we have some solid concepts that rethinks how systems can capture multiple workflows in such a way they avoid endless configuration options and hardcoded prescriptive paths. We will be creating some narrative around this to get out here for people to think on and feedback…

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Supporters Guide

https://www.supporters.guide/

Made in a Book Sprint where also the participants were a lot of friends of mine 🙂

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In our book, we propose a way forward for us as a community to build an ideal future truly supportive of researchers. We believe we can work more effectively together than when alone by drawing on the existing work of others. But more than that, we would be even more powerful as a community based on values that come out of this collective interest. Coordination is difficult, and this is best addressed not by any set of rules, but by working more effectively together.

We offer a number of current observations: examples of successfully run efforts that support research communications and descriptions of anti-patterns which have an opposite effect. We then delve into core issues plaguing our efforts — funding, governance, rewarding, and communication — and provide suggestions based on patterns and opportunities embedded within these issues we have identified. We close with ten shared values that most exemplify what brings us together as well as how we can work more effectively as a community. The aim of this book is to bring Supporters together as a community. Let us start the conversation about what this means to practice these values in our collective endeavor.