Introduction to open and reproducible workflows in the public service

A repository to house materials for a workshop introducing participants to open and reproducible principles.

This workshop is created for the Experimentation Works (EW) working group's second cohort, a Government-of-Canada initiative to build public servants’ capacity in experimentation skills and practice that supports and showcases small-scale experiments in the open. Additional information about this initiative can be found here.

The goal of this workshop is to teach EW2 professionals open and reproducible workflows by introducing tools like R or Github. Open source tools are commonly used in many scientific disciplines for statistical analysis, generating production-quality graphics, and automating data workflow tasks. The workshop contents will introduce tools and best practices, giving attendees a foundation in the fundamentals of reproducible workflows.

We will be using slido for this workshop open this link or use participant code #45527 on sli.do

Slides for the presentation are here

Workshop structure

LIVE POLL TIME!

Introduction

• What's the problem?
  • Government is closed
  • The public doesn't know how decisions are made
  • Duplication of work within the government
  • Types of reproducibility

LIVE POLL TIME

• Open and reproducible workflows as a solution

  • Openness and transparency in government
  • Evidence-based decision making
  • Efficiency
  • Enable others to use our methods or help improve ours

• Barriers to open and reporducible workflows

  • Directives
  • Approval of management
  • Data privacy

Tools

• Tools for reproducible workflows in the project life cycle
  • Data
    • Shared drive/LAN/Sharepoint
    • Google sheets
    • Open govenment portal
    • GitHub
  • Methods
    • GCconnex
    • Protocols.io
    • GitHub
  • Result
    • Shared drive/LAN/Sharepoint
    • Google docs
    • Github
  • Communication product
    • Cochrane reports
    • Open access publications
    • Public talks
    • Media
    • Github
  • Giving and receiving credit
    • Code licences (MIT/Open Canada)
    • Information licences (Creative Commons)
    • Github

LIVE POLL TIME

• Questions? Unmute yourself or ask the question in slido ☕
• Break time (Length to be determined)

Holy Grail

• Reproducible projects
  • What is a reproducible project?
  • Auditable, Accurate, Collaborative
  • Has programming language, code editor, version control software
  • Example reporducible project with beavers!

FINAL QUIZ!

Workshop schedule

Activity	Start Time	End time
Intro	00:00	00:10
Tools	00:10	00:30
Questions?	00:30	00:40
Break	00:40	00:50
Holy Grail	00:50	00:80
Quiz +End	00:80	00:90

Workshop organization

• Instructors: Noushin Nabavi, Monica Granados

Resources (blogs, sites, books, courses):

• Matthew Shotwell's slides (2011): "Approaches and Barriers to Reproducible Practices in Biostatistics"
• NIH Training Module: Reproducibility through rigor and transparenct
• Gandrud, Christopher. Reproducible Research with R and R Studio, CRC Press, 2013.
• Xie, Yihui. Dynamic Documents with R and knitr, Vol. 29. CRC Press, 2013.
• ROpenSci's blog post: "Reproducible research is still a challenge", by R. FitzJohn, M. Pennell, A. Zanne, W. Cornwell, June 9, 2014
• Karl Broman's class "Tools for Reproducible Research" at UWisconsin-Madison.
• "Reproducible Research" by Johns Hopkins on Coursera (Peng, Leek, Caffo)
• Stodden, Victoria, Friedrich Leisch, and Roger D. Peng, eds. Implementing reproducible research, CRC Press, 2014.
• StackOverflow question "Why should I use version control?"
• Learn git on github: link

Getting Help or Reporting an Issue

To report bugs/issues/feature requests, please file an issue.

How to Contribute

If you would like to contribute, please see our CONTRIBUTING guidelines.

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.