GitHub and the working group – Part II

In an earlier post, I outlined my plans to try to teach and use GitHub for code related to our big Biodiversity Working Group. Feb 22-26, 20 members of the group met in Leipzig, Germany, and 6 more (including myself) participated remotely (#sChange on twitter). I felt this was a bit of an experiment, as our group is quite large, and I knew that the majority of participants would be novice git users. There is much yet to do now that the workshop is over, but after a week, I can definitely identify a few challenges and successes in using GitHub for our working group.

GitHub and the working group

Over the past year, I’ve been co-organizing a jointly-funded, large, international working group (with co-PIs Maria Dornelas, Mary O’Connor, and Andrew Gonzalez). The group has had several meetings now (October 2014, May 2015, June 2015) and will meet again next week with the goal of finishing ongoing projects and making major progress on several new ones. I’ve learned a lot about managing large collaborative working groups through this process, but one area I’ve been thinking a lot about this week is how to maintain good communication before, during, and after the working group, especially with respect to code.