Reflecting on My Time as a Fellow

As one of the inaugural Reproducible Research Fellows of Frictionless Data, I am eager to share my experience of the program with you about working with Sele, Ouso and Monica under the leadership of Lilly Winfree this year. I could not have asked for a better group of individuals to work remotely with.

Monica, Sele, Lilly, Ouso and I on our most recent conference call :)

Sele, Ouso, Monica and I spent the last nine months discussing common issues in research reproducibility and delving into the philosophy behind open data science. Together we learned to apply Frictionless Data tools to our own data and mastered techniques for streamlining the reproducibility of our own research process. Lilly was an excellent mentor throughout the program and was always there to help with any issues we ran into.

This was also one of my first experiences working entirely remotely on a team across many time zones. Through the use of Google hangout, Zoom and Slack the entire process was easier than I ever thought it could be. It is wonderful that through technology we are able to collaborate across the world easier than ever before.

We were also able to give multiple presentations together. Monica and I were joint speakers as part of the CVS conference where we talk about our experience as fellows, and our experience using Frictionless Data tools. With so many people on the Zoom call it really felt like were part of a large community.

The four of us also led a hands-on workshop introducing the DataPackage Creator and Goodtables web interface tools. This was especially fun for me because we used a subset of my French Polynesia interview data as practice data for all workshop participants. Many of the questions asked by participants mirrored questions the four of us had already worked through together, so it was great to be able to share what we had learned with others.

I look forward to sharing these tools and the philosophy of open data science throughout my career and am very grateful to the Open Knowledge Foundation for this amazing learning opportunity. If you would like to learn more about my experience in the Frictionless Data Fellows program please feel free to reach out to me personally!