How to setup a focus group

This page descibe how to setup a focus group.

First, assess the data in OSDR and related NASA Biological resources then outline a question you think it can help answer.

1. Team Formation and Roles:

• Team Composition: Identify the team members and their specific bioinformatics expertise (e.g., genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics).

• Role Definition: Clearly define roles for each researcher (e.g., Prof, data analysis lead, scripting expert, visualization specialist, referencing lead, communications lead).

• Communication Channels: Establish preferred communication methods (e.g., weekly or monthly virtual meetings, project management software (See example spreadsheets), instant messaging (eg OSDR 'Discourse' https://awg.osdr.space/)).

2. Project Scope and Goals:

• Research Question: Clearly define the central research question or hypothesis driving the project.

• Project Objectives: Outline specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives for the research.

• Deliverables: Identify specific deliverables for each project phase (e.g., data analysis reports, code repositories, publications).

What can you imagine?

3. Project Management Tools and Practices:

• Project Management Software: Consider using software (e.g., Asana, Trello, github or Spread sheet Gantt chart examples) to track tasks, deadlines, and dependencies between analyses.

• Version Control System: Implement a version control system (e.g., Github) to track code changes and facilitate collaboration by centralising figure and data saving.

• Data Management Plan: Develop a plan for data storage, organization, and access to ensure data integrity and reproducibility (Goal to submit repository to Zenodo to generate DOI along with a reseach paper summarizing insights).

What parts of the ecosystem do you like the most.

4. Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing:

• Regular Meetings: Schedule weekly or bi-weekly team meetings to discuss progress, and challenges, and plan future steps (Save slide shows in repo & share in gitbook to create a record of intermediate data products and insights).

• Knowledge Sharing Sessions: Encourage researchers to share their expertise through team presentations or code walkthroughs (Design hackathons with specific goals).

• Collaborative Resources: Create a centralized repository (Github) for research protocols, scripts, and data analysis pipelines to avoid duplication and loss. This is a great place to save the results from the NASA open science data archive data visualisation application.

5. Progress Monitoring and Evaluation:

• Project Review Meetings: Conduct regular meetings to assess progress towards objectives and identify areas for improvement.

• Define milestones and Deadlines: Establish clear milestones and set realistic deadlines for each research phase (Using the Spreadsheet with ganntt chart example).

• Data Analysis Validation: Define strategies for validating data analyses and ensuring reproducibility.

6. Resource Management and Training:

• Training and Development: Identify opportunities for skill development and provide training for new software or bioinformatics tools.

• Study selection: Allocate lists of OSDR accession ID's on each researcher teams defined goals.

• Software requirements: Track project software tools, licenses, computational resources, and other research needs.

7. Communication with Stakeholders:

• Regular Updates: Provide updates on research progress to project stakeholders (e.g., principal investigator, funding agencies) at predetermined intervals via notes in the project management document (Adding slide shows to gitbooks and results files to github folders can help you communicate with other collaborators on the focus group).

• Data Sharing: Develop a plan for data sharing following research policies and ethical guidelines (save data products openly in github and then push to zenodo when ready for publication).

• NASA Open Science Data Access: Lots of data can be found in the Open Science Data Repository.

8. Project Closure and Dissemination:

• Final Report / Peer-reviewed publication: Prepare a comprehensive final report summarizing the research findings, methodology, and limitations of the study (Select target journal early).

• Publication Strategy: Develop a publication strategy to disseminate research results through peer-reviewed journals and relevant conferences (Presentation &/or poster at ASGSR &/or OSDR virtual symposium).

• AWG Project Final Summary: Hold a final project presentation at a meeting to discuss lessons learned and potential future research directions (Reflection on lessons learnt to inspire other groups).

Special thanks to Dr Lauren Sanders and the NASA OSDR for the inspirational figures we've included to inspire your next research decisions.