STAPLE: Software for Scientists

Erin M. Buchanan

STAPLE

Welcome!

  • Project management: were any of us ever actually trained for this?
  • Individual projects with one or two other local collaborators can be quite complex with many moving parts
  • Now, add other people, institutions, geopolitical regions, languages, cultures, and the complexity increases exponentially
  • We’ve tried it all:
    • Google docs!
    • Crazy excel sheets!

Why Software?

  • Project management software exists: Asana, Monday, Clickup, Trello
    • That’s not designed for scientists
  • Classroom software actually works ok (Canvas, Blackboard, etc.)
    • But it ain’t great
  • What if we could have our own software, designed for our own problems?

Why Software?

  • Creating Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) outputs is … hard
  • New rules and laws that make metadata a necessity
    • Lots of work, no good standards across science
    • We probably have to be forced to do it
  • As authorship –> contributorship becomes more complicated, we should be able to say who did what on a project and when

What is the Mission?

  • Project Management software that allows you to document your project to improve transparency
  • STAPLE (like the stapler ok?): Science Tracking Across the Project Lifespan
  • This project has been funded by NASA and the Psychological Science Accelerator

STAPLE Structure

  • Two main areas of work:
    • An overall dashboard that demonstrates all projects, tasks, notifications and more
    • A project focused area that shows tasks, data, progress, and more

Overall Dashboard

  • Dashboard gives you an overview of everything you have in STAPLE
    • You will be able to customize which blocks you want and where they are

Overall Dashboard

  • Projects allows you to view and create projects

Overall Dashboard

  • Tasks shows you all tasks and you can jump between projects and tasks
  • Forms allows you to create metadata collection forms for all types of outputs

Overall Dashboard

  • Notifications show you what projects, tasks, or other events have happened
  • Labels allow you to create your own “credit” categories to label your final project summary

Project Structure

Project Dashboard

  • Views are different depending on if you are a contributor or project manager.
  • The project dashboard has lots of options for project tracking including contributors, teams, tasks, metadata, and notifications.

Project Dashboard

  • Tasks show you the tasks for a project, add new tasks, kanban board views, etc.
  • Elements are “buckets” to organize tasks and metadata forms for project summaries
  • Contributors are individuals attached to the project

Project Dashboard

  • Teams are ways to cluster contributions based on data collection, translation, or other structures

Project Dashboard

  • Labels allow you to assign “credit” to tasks and people
  • Form Data shows you the summary of metadata, download specific metadata json files, and see what’s missing
  • Summary provides a human readable summary of the project, which can be organized in various structures to save for sharing (as well as the machine readable json forms)
  • Settings include the project level metadata

Metadata

Timeline

  • Grant started October 2023
  • MVP due October 2024
  • Release as open source software
  • Create a sustainable plan for our hosted version
  • Community improvement
  • Find more grant $

Last Notes

  • Join our slack!
  • We need beta testers and people to interview about the project
  • Documentation, app, and more at https://staple.science/

  • Erin Buchanan
  • Marton Kovacs
  • Engerst Yedra
  • HU UI/UX Team
  • Chris Hartgerink