Tools#

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Use this section to explain your philosophy regarding the use of third-party tools. This might be “we all use this tool”, “use whatever tool you like” or somewhere in between.

By tools, we mean things like:

  • Programming languages

  • Version control

  • Document creation and sharing tools

  • Communication and meetings platforms

There are a wide variety of tools that we use our day-to-day activities. We are flexible and allow everyone to use the tools that work best for them, but at the same time we recognise that it can be helpful to have an agreed set of tools that as a minimum, everyone will use.

Tools that we use as a team#

The following are the minimum set of tools that we ask everyone in the group to be familiar with.

FIXME Instructions

We have added some initial examples in this section, but you should discuss with your group and agree which tools work best for everyone, then modify as appropriate and add links to your specific workspaces or network.

Messaging#

We use Slack for instant messaging within the group.

  • Say “hello!” to the team each day

  • Prefer posting things to our communal #group channel rather than direct messages

  • Use threads to reply to messages

  • However, messages don’t last forever (the free version of Slack limits the size of your chat history), so don’t use it for anything you need to keep a record of

We use email for sharing information with external collaborators, or where we need keep a record of the communication (for example, when getting approval for something)

  • Email is not guaranteed to be secure and has a limit on attachment size, so when sharing documents we prefer to use SharePoint’s sharing links feature.

Online meetings#

We use Teams for internal calls and Zoom for calls including external collaborators.

  • Please switch on video if you are comfortable doing so.

  • If you plan to record the call then check everyone is happy with this before proceeding.

  • If we need to use a collaborative whiteboard then we use Google Jamboard for internal calls, and Miro if we are working with external collaborators.

  • For workshops where we need to run voting or polls, we use the features built-in to Zoom, or Slido if we need more functionality.

Documents#

We use Office 365 for most of our documents and store them on our group SharePoint site, so we all have access to them

  • Sharing links can be created to share large files securely with external collaborators, rather than using email

Programming#

Some projects necessitate the use of a particular programming language. When there isn’t a specific requirement, we recommend checking our team profiles and choosing something with the greatest overlap. From experience, this is likely to be either Python or R.

We use Git for version control and make use of our group organisation on GitHub, unless a project already has its own repository.

Guidelines for choosing your own tools#

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You may have some recommendations for other tools, such as text editors.

There may also be legal or data protection requirements that limit the tools you can use.

You are welcome to make use of other tools such as text editors and development environments.

  • We suggest you look for free, open source software

  • If you’re not sure what to use then we recommend VS Code as a cross-platform code editor

  • When doing data visualisation, we suggest you use a format that allows text and images to be included alongside code to create a narrative document

Warning

Avoid storing data on third-party cloud services unless all of your project’s data is open. Such services will not necessarily have the same level of security and privacy protection as our official providers.