5 EHA Team Communication

How do we work together and keep a useful record of our interactions?

• Slack is our office chat tool and is good for day-to-day communication. Slack does not have to be an instant communication tool - some people prefer to check it a few times a day. Check with your supervisor about your project/team preferences. Slack’s main purpose is to organize our communication by channels specific to a topic or project. It is good for keeping information from one project together in a way that can be referenced later by new team members, rather than being lost in various e-mail inboxes. A channel can be linked to many other tools (Dropbox/Google Drive Folder, GitHub Repository), so as to have a central hub for project management. E-mails can be forwarded to a channel.

  Slack also has voice-calling and, critically, screen-sharing capabilities that are useful for pair-debugging while programming.

• GitHub (see below) has a good issue-tracking system that accompanies each project and can be used for task management and general communication. This ties messages to a specific project and keeps a good long-term record, and can be connected to a slack channel or integrated with e-mail

• Remember that your Slack and GitHub communications are part of your project and are likely to be seen by both internal and external collaborators.

5.1 Install

• Download and install Slack. If you don’t alread have an invite, get one from Noam. Join the #data-sci-discuss and #journal-club channels and any others your supervisor suggests or are associated with projects you are assigned to.
• There’s also a mobile Slack app for iOS and Android, which may be helpful if you are traveling.