| Zoom |
We are holding fortnightly team meetings using Zoom, alternating with fortnightly discussion meetings. Smaller sub-groups of team members also meet via Zoom as needed. The use of videoconferencing technology for meetings was necessitated by COVID-19, but has also allowed us to record meetings, both for the benefit of those who are unable to attend, for later analysis, and to incorporate into research outputs. We share screens within Zoom in order to demonstrate visualisations and work through data structures. We share links in the Zoom chat, both to our own documents, and to potential data sources, examples of visualisations, and useful tools. The Zoom white board and annotation features have provided us with a mechanism for conducting visual retrospectives to reflect on our progress to date and brainstorm where to go next. Affordances: talking in real time, sharing screen (showing), chat. |
Audio and video recordings; Transactional time series data (call history); Chat text |
Teams, Skype |
| Microsoft Teams |
Outside of meetings, we communicate with one another through chat in Teams. We have a collaboration Teams site, with a number of different channels for things like links and resources and upskilling. Most the chat takes place in the general channel. The Teams site also services as the repository for many of the documents, data files, and research records associated with the collaboration. In the Files section of Teams we have a folder structure for storing all of the collaboration documentation. The files stored here are living documents and can be collaboratively edited by all members of the team. They are often created on the fly, shared, and edited during Zoom meetings. The downside to Teams is that there is little transparency over how it displays certain file types (eg. whether it plays animated gifs posted in chat) and its tendency to automatically rename plain text files to remove the .txt file extension. It is also not clear how or whether it is possible to export chat text from Teams. We’ve used Team’s chat for data exploration, with quick data visualisations posted for discussion that leads to questions that lead further data visualisations. Affordances: channels, posts, comments, upload files, reactions |
Number of posts; Number of posts in channels; Number of comments to posts (through all modes, vid, text etc); Kinds of files uploaded (vid, text, etc); Like buttons |
Slack channels has features for keeping track of different conversation threads but without the integration into the MS tools it would have been harder to collaborate. |
| Microsoft SharePoint |
Microsoft SharePoint integrates with the Teams site we use for collaboration and is used for file storage. Files stored in SharePoint can be edited using versions of Microsoft products that integrate with the Teams Desktop application or with the browser or can be edited in the authoring application. Affordances: file upload, file structure, collaborative writing, version control, track changes |
Audit log; Files; Folder structure |
Share drive, Mediaflux |
| Microsoft Word |
Notes of team meetings and drafts of documents have been written in Microsoft Word, stored in SharePoint, and edited collaboratively through Teams. |
Text (formatted) |
In some cases, for documents that are intended to become research outputs that will be shared openly, the team considered using markdown with Git to author the document, but ended up opting for Word, primarily out of familiarity. |
| Microsoft Power Point |
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| Microsoft Outlook |
Affordances: emails, calendar invites. |
Calendars – meeting attendance; Communication |
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| Microsoft Excel |
Excel was chosen for collecting the metadata about the surveys of interest. We decided on the data dictionary as a team, which we documented in the second sheet, and this data dictionary formed the column headings of the first sheet, which is where the survey metadata was entered. |
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We could have used survey tools such as Qualtrics or Google Forms, connected to Google Sheets, to gather this data, but it was felt that it would take too much effort to set these up, and that Excel was located with and fit the working practices we already had in place for this collaboration, as well as being a familiar tool. |
| GitLab |
GitLab Issues are being used to manage tasks and activities. |
Commit history (git log) |
GitHub. We chose to use GitLab because it is hosted and managed by the University of Melbourne, whereas GitHub is hosted on public servers that are not located in Australia. |