Community and Collaboration

Post by Malvika Sharan, 2019-07-30

Today we discussed my work as a Community Manager at EMBL, while Maria-Theresa got to sit with me during Bio-IT’s weekly drop-in sessions. I told her about the roles of community managers in the current collaborative world of science. I also shared with her the challenges I faced in my current job while choosing to dedicate my full-time in community management, which meant I couldn’t do research anymore - simply because i didn’t have the time to do both properly.

So, even though I miss working on research projects, I definitely identify myself as a community manager more. At work, part of my responsibilities is to learn and bring best practices of Open Science to my community and share them with others. This doesn’t mean that I have to be an expert on everything. If I can turn to a right person, or point others to a particular skill/resource that can improve their work, that’s a win for everyone involved. Therefore, collaboration is the key, either you are a researcher or a community manager.

Image on Unsplash by @mimithian

Staying on the theme of collaboration, we spent the morning working on GitHub on collaborative repositories. Her first project was to learn about the different things you can do with GitHub. We used a semi-supervised learning format where I shared this introductory material with her, which I had adapted from this material developed in Mozilla Science Lab by Kirstie Whitaker. She took the table next to mine in my office, and asked questions whenever she got stuck or didn’t understand something. After a lunch with my lab members, we collaboratively worked on setting Gitpages, one for her homepage and another for this project. She enjoyed this process of setting her website, but I promised her that we will use command-line to use Git during one of her next visits.

We finished our day by recording a small interview with her which I will share in our next post.

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