STAPLE: Software for Scientists

Erin M. Buchanan & Marton Kovacs

Welcome!

  • As big-team enthusiasts, you have likely realized none of us were trained for this
  • Individual projects with one or two other local collaborators can be quite complex with many moving parts
  • Now, add other people, institutions, geopolitical regions, languages, cultures, and the complexity increases exponentially
  • We’ve tried it all:
    • Google docs!
    • Crazy excel sheets!

Why Software?

  • Project management software exists: Asana, Monday, Clickup, Trello
    • That’s not designed for us
  • Classroom software actually works ok
    • But it ain’t great
  • What if we could have our own software, designed for our own problems?

Why Software?

  • Creating FAIR outputs is … hard
  • Lots of work, no good standards
  • We probably have to be forced to do it

Why Software?

  • As authorship –> contributorship becomes more complicated, we should be able to say who did what on a project and when
  • Again, tracking that is hard!

What is the Mission?

  • Project Management that allows you to document your project to improve transparency
  • STAPLE (like the stapler ok?): Science Tracking Across the Project Lifespan
  • This project has been funded by NASA and the PSA

Today’s Goals

  • Check out the software demo
  • React! Tell us your feelings
  • Check out the proposed metadata
  • React! Tell us your feelings

Metadata?

  • Metadata is the data about your “outputs”
  • Citations are just metadata for a research article
  • Metadata can include codebooks for datasets
  • But also can be included for nearly everything we do
  • You will check out our proposed metadata categories
    • Are we missing any?
    • What should be included with each category?

Metadata?

  • Action: tracking when things happen within a project
  • Project: the global project level information
  • Contributor: person information about who is doing stuff on project
  • Contributorship System: how you will track CRediT or others
  • Organization: the university/ngo/organization a contributor is attached to

Metadata?

  • Documents: data, stimuli, materials, ethics, and much more
    • Text
    • Audio
    • Video
    • Pictures
  • Data: a special category of documents that will include special extra parts
    • Primary Data
    • Secondary Data

Last Notes

  • Join our slack!
  • We will need beta testers.
  • The UX team wants to talk to people … are you those people?
  • Documentation, app, and more at https://staple.science/