Introduction, Purpose and Community Makeup

Introduction/Aim

We are hoping to build a diverse group of people who are interested in the Workbench and Data Analytics.

The aim is to enhance our collective understanding of working with SenseMaker® project data and have a forum where new ideas are explored that keeps a permanent record for other viewers.

Diverse Membership

Here is a preliminary list of types of people we think could enjoy reading and contributing to these pages.

1. Business people who wish to highlight important things they are trying to do in their projects - like questions they are trying to answer but do not necessarily know the best way of implementing an answer to bringing these questions to the software. Thus no technical, statistical or analytics systems knowledge even necessary to contribute here.
2. People with data analytics experience, whether technical or not (i.e. not necessarily with the statistical, mathematical or computational experience) who have ideas on how problems/questions can be addressed we should be looking at in the Workbench.
3. Data analytical people with the mathematical and/or computational experience to enable progress in solving issues raised in 1 and 2 above, or even providing ideas out of the blue because they know of useful techniques - i.e. solutions that may address problems we’d not thought of or not realised any connection with a technique.
4. UX/UI experts who can help think about and provide input into the design of the Workbench itself - e.g. styling, layout and positioning. The current workbench has had to UX specialist input at all - it is all raw R Shiny. We need CSS, HTML, Javascript (nice to have) experiences here.
5. R and R Shiny skilled people who would like to help 1 to 4 in doing experimental code, mock ups and so on to help verify whether ideas can work. That is we are keen to publish code that is entirely experimental to the community and clients, written by members. It will be possible for us to sufficiently generalise the code for inclusion in the workbench or we just run some of it outside the Workbench for trial purposes.
6. Anyone wishing to contribute to the R code in the Workbench is welcome - please speak to Peter Stanbridge. There are some outstanding architectural issues that can be addressed as well as updating the code (it pre-dates shiny modules, R6 classes, tidyverse etc.)

Activities and interactions

We hope to have Zoom calls for the whole group (in different time zones) in an agreed regular interval. But the main official activity will take place in the wiki.

But hopefully members will feel free and open to have conversations themselves with others in the community in an ad-hoc way, whenever some common discussion interest or issue arises. The key request is that anything important is then updated or created in the wiki for everyone to see and contribute.