---
# System prepended metadata

title: 2025 Annual Retreat
tags: [Group planning]

---

# 2025 Annual Retreat, 2024 Q4 review / 2025 Q1 planning meeting

**Date:** January 13 - 14, 2025
**Location:** Santa Rita Experimental Station

Participants:

- Kristina
- Eric
- Chris

## Homework

* Add all relevant work + hours from this quarter to [effort spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Nxa4HiCYmQ4oXa41XR7kBIpRoatxD-Efp0VBUpRLDk/edit?gid=774311338#gid=774311338)
    * "July - Dec CCT DS" tab
* Update and Score previous quarter OKRs
    * [2024 Q4 OKRs](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HQ7t5pH_3lZ6eNwWI137pJu97AvUFutDF7EcQLTvKNk/edit?gid=1038020054#gid=1038020054)
* Draft next quarter OKRs
    * [2025 Q1 OKRs](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10HHDw2AtD-5wET7llwfa8uxXiLMLlbfSwENyEI-f_N0/edit?gid=1038020054#gid=1038020054)
* Review 
    * [notes from previous meeting](https://hackmd.io/PZilEg3AT_qh9mSQYdjBeg) and [annual meeting](https://hackmd.io/iltgSPr2R1OuVC-tQV75eg)
    * Link above includes homework
* Suggest topics below
* Create a presentation & add it to the [2025 Q1 folder](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1lbRHN8mSvg8R1gPqHnesGY_pA8vncLl2); summarize: 
  * Major accomplishments
  * What went well, what didn't 
  * Plans for next quarter

## Agenda

### Monday
* 8:00: Kristina pick up car from motor pool
* 8:15 - 8:45: Pick up Eric & Chris
* 9:00 - 10:00: Tour of Campus Ag Center space for Drone Day
* 10:00 - 10:30: Stop at grocery to pick up food
* 10:30 - 11:30: Drive to experiment station
* 1:00 - ?: DSI team joining
* 6:00 - 7:00: dinner
* 7:00 - 8:00: board game (Unstable Unicorns)? 


### Tuesday
* 8:30 - 9:00: breakfast
* 9:00 - 12:00: group presentations / discussion
* 12:00 - 1:00: lunch
* 1:00 - 2:00: [Johari window exercise](https://www.mindtools.com/au7v71d/the-johari-window)
* 2:00 - 3:00: impact metrics brainstorming session - make wishlist, identify what we already have and what we would need
* Leave around 3pmish


## Notes

- Instead of "Kristina takes over", "Kristina is promoted to Director"
- Working with each other on projects
    - Easier when we had more people, and with 2 people on incubators
    - Paying attention to when we can help during project hour (and standups?)
- New hire
- Teaching ideas
    - Michele & Eric co-teach RNAseq in R (Michele uses Python, probably?)
    - targets w/ babel whale (?)
- Challenge is too many ways to share new knowledge / professional development
    - Sprint planning demos, technical vignettes, GitHub issues, short videos
    - Idea: once per quarter, each member identifies a skill or some other professional development to learn and share with group members as an OKR.
- Impact metrics
    - Pieces of this: talking to new people (and how to track, if at all), documenting passive unasked for positive comments, asking for testimonials, workshop assessment, effort spreadsheet
- Paid code review concept
    - Could be a ton of work, especially for making improvements
    - Reproducibility audit would be more tractable
    - How high level? 
    - US-RSE code review group
- Investigating and suggesting tools, as a type of programming (but not actually doing them)
    - Like what the Data Cooperative does a lot of
    - Would need to disclaimer this a lot (YMMV, etc.)
    - Maybe list types of consultations? First hour free model...?
- Discord:
    - Use it for Fall Reproducibility series to kick it off?
    - Move drop-in hours to Discord (so both sychronous and asynchronous help is in the same place)
- New projects vs ongoing work
    - More incubators with grad students? 
- Red squirrel 
    - Wrap-up meeting, next steps? They want more functionality
- Group rebranding...
    - Computational research support, data science and x, reproducibility 
    - Focus group or some feedback from researchers on what different terms mean
    - What is "research software"? What does that include? What do researchers think that means?
        - Article: https://vsoch.github.io/2020/what-is-research-software/ 
- 2025 workshop schedule
    - Individual workshops
        - February: Eric re-teach targets
        - April: Eric do HPC for R users with HPC folks (Chris Reidy)
        - May: Kristina teach something...
    - Viz series: most of the materials will be reused; do at same time (June); Kristina & Eric will coteach, with Devin as guest instructor again; start planning in April
    - Fall workshop series: talk with DSI folks about collab; who will be second instructor?; have plan and start advertising by end of spring semester (early May)
- Impact metrics discussion
    - Not as easy as business, how much money did you save?
    - How else would you have done this work, if at all? What would have been the pros and cons?
    - Ultimate question: How much money equivalent do we generate? (ROI+ concept)
        - Peoples' time saved, new things that you couldn't do otherwise
        - Offset by our salaries
        - Jetstream ROI paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8603169&casa_token=UYQqo5Zim-MAAAAA:BsyUTS26htMnAudsFPtOX3q_L-_RZIyGwV0vM-7Vbl-qj9TjvG5KWfEQWIJ8zUMb4RoNq5tOyQ&tag=1 
    - Our skills will stay here, while postdocs and grad students will likely leave
    - How much would a workshop cost (in academia and industry)? (USF pay)
    - Comparing how much it costs vs how much value they provide for us vs grad student vs an outside professional
        - Case study for outside person
- People don't want in person, synch training anymore (TACC)

## Discussion Topics / Parking Lot

- Figure out trainings for the year
- DSI folks
    - Talk about their training plans
        - Co-teaching fall workshop series? 
    - Other annual goals
- New potential programming
    - Code review as a service -- stolen from 2024 annual retreat notes
    - Some examples:
        - Institution specific: [Princeton](https://researchcomputing.princeton.edu/services/repo-review-consultations)
        - Domain specific: [Digital Humanities](https://dhcodereview.github.io/)
- Better ways to learn within group? 
    - Technical vignettes, yay or nay? 
- Work with Micheale(?) and Carlos on understanding how they use and teach AI

