Introduction: Peer Review Comments

[Holly-Transport]

Dear DIME Team,

On behalf of the Development Data Partnership, I am delighted to review this excellent piece of work. Following are general comments on the Introduction for the team's consideration.

Through the introduction, the team does an excellent job of convincing the reader of the relevance data process standardization. We especially appreciate that the objective of the handbook is broader than just presenting DIME’s successful methodologies, rather, to leverage DIME’s experience to encourage more standardization in general:

“This book will discuss specific standards recommended by DIME Analytics, but we are more interested in convince the reader to discuss the adoption of a standard within research teams than to necessarily use the particular standards that we recommend.”

“A major aim of this book is to encourage research teams to think of the tools and processes they use for designing, collecting, and handling data just as they do for analytical tasks.”

“…we think that development practitioners must think about their code and programming workflows just as methodologically as they think about their research workflows…”

I particularly appreciated the work flow diagram on page 13 (no figure number or title -- the team may consider adding these). I also noted that this diagram is slightly different from the one proposed at the end of the handbook, in the Bringing it All Together section. The team may want to either update these to make them the same or provide an additional caption, helping the reader understand the different purposes of each.

Overall, nicely done.

Holly Krambeck