Responding to a group retrospective
The first ds-incubator meetup of 2021 was a retrospective. I consulted 2DII folks on (a) what went well, (b) what didn’t go so well, and (c) how can the ds-incubator improve. I also asked if the ds-incubator had any effect in the way we now work at 2DII. Based on that feedback, here I present and discuss the decisions I made.
Nominate a timekeeper to help end on time.
Use “round of voices” to encourage a critical discussion and practice dialogue1.
Although stand-alone meetups are welcome, prefer meetup-series. This makes it easy for the leader to prepare and for attendees to follow. Regarding meetup-series:
Deprecate the use of labels “must-have” and “nice-to-have”. The practices project is a better alternative.
Design content as a demo rather than an interactive workshop.
Articulate the relevance for the intended audience. Thrive to give concrete examples for 2DII.
Articulate what the audience can do to learn more, e.g. where to find materials to reproduce the contents of the lesson.
Schedule. Do not change the time/day for now. While it’d be great to move the meetup to avoid meetings back-to-back, I fear losing frequent attendees.
Demos versus interactive-tutorials. There is good evidence showing that people learn better by doing something than by seeing someone else do something; yet, I trade the benefit of interactive lessons for the benefit of demos: covering more material in the same amount of time. This seems particularly appropriate given that the audience does not directly choose the meetup topic, and thus some topics they may only want to “hear about”. If they are indeed motivated, the demo should guide them to learn more.
Interactive workshop. A longer workshop is an idea I like and developed (e.g. tidy-ds), but I think it complements rather than replace the ds-incubator. Workshops take a long time to prepare so they are a slower way to respond to “the challenge at hand” that we experience at 2DII.
Relevance. It’s hard to develop an example that is realistic yet simple enough to not burry general concepts in specific details. Another challenge is that the intended audience is not just 2DII but also beyond. The broader relevance should make the content more appealing to you and me – to you because it’s a skill you can transfer elsewhere, and to me because content that helps folks outside 2DII allows me to give back to the R community what I learned from it.
Meta. The retrospective helped me make informed decisions.
Structure. Meetups could benefit from a bit more structure, and guide from the meetup template.
Relevance. The effect of the ds-incubator seems to be not great on its own but important in adding to the compound effect of multiple efforts – of which the ds-incubator is only one.
The retrospective finished with two round of voices: The first one to comment on what’s written above, and the second one to suggest meetup topics for 2021 – which I followed up with a poll on Slack.
Dialogue here is used as described in Crucial Conversations, where the pool of meaning expands when everyone shares their opinion, rather than keeping silent or getting violent.↩︎
For attribution, please cite this work as
Lepore (2021, Jan. 21). Data science at 2DII: The ds-incubator: Reflecting on 2020 to plan 2021. Retrieved from https://2degreesinvesting.github.io/posts/2021-01-21-retrospective-for-ds-incubator-meetups-in-2020/
BibTeX citation
@misc{lepore2021the,
author = {Lepore, Mauro},
title = {Data science at 2DII: The ds-incubator: Reflecting on 2020 to plan 2021},
url = {https://2degreesinvesting.github.io/posts/2021-01-21-retrospective-for-ds-incubator-meetups-in-2020/},
year = {2021}
}