research-support-network/research-support-network.github.io

Research Support Network - Expert Volunteer List

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This repo hosts a list of researchers with computational expertise volunteering to provide virtual support and advice for scientists forced to refocus on computational work due to a crisis.

More information, access to the list, and the submission form for joining the list can be found here!

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To contact the list's maintainers, report any bugs, or request removal or amendment of your entry in the list, please raise an issue in this repo or write to [email protected]. For general discussion you can find some of us on matrix.org.

research-support-network.github.io's Issues

Summary & Explanations

Text needed:

• A brief Summary / Statement of Purpose / About section on the landing page
• Other important bits of information (also on the landing page)
• Some info to the entry form
• Some info to the list page
• A README in the repo
• A simple code of conduct
• Some links to other resources

I will write something up today or tomorrow.

Layout / Formatting

Although style is obviously not our priority here, it would be nice to make a few improvements to the way things look.

Please comment your suggestions below - or just cook something up and make a pull request!

I'll keep a running list of suggested improvements here.

• On the list, make the cards a bit wider so the expertise text fits better
• Figure out how to add and build from a custom css file
• Update fonts and basics to look decent
• Add margins on all sides (top and bottom, and especially left and right)
• Increase the leading spaces of headers
• Background color
• Style the list cards
• Style the form structure and inputs

Launch Testing 💥

Hi everyone,

As per my email, please each submit a few (3-5) forms with different kinds of entries on Wednesday (23.03.22) afternoon, especially around 3pm GMT if you have time (doesn't need to be exactly 3pm, though).

This is to stress test the site / form / staticman engine. Feel free to try entering some things that you're not supposed to (empty fields, too much text, etc.).

Please report any issues you encounter in this thread! Thanks!

Expert Mailing List

Based on a discussion with @tobyhodges regarding the Code of Conduct (see PR #20), it would be important that experts who sign up are given the option of being added to a mailing list through which we can contact them to make them aware of participants that have reportedly breached the CoC.

Ideally...

• ...we'd have a sign-up option on the page that is displayed upon submission of the form (see #18)
• ...we'd be able to build the mailing list on our Gmail account and send the emails out from there

However, Gmail doesn't seem to offer a functionality for having people sign up into a Google Contacts list, and the only real option I found by some quick googling requires two third-party services (see here).

My best guess would be to set up a link to a Google form, which I believe can output a CSV, from which the addresses can easily (though not automatically) be imported as contacts.

Any thoughts on this or any better suggestions? If not, I'll try to set this up tonight.

Search Functionality

Would be nice if the list was searchable, e.g. using a simple free-text search similar to that available in the EMBO list.

One possibly quite easy solution could be Simple Jekyll Search; see tutorial here.

I can try and figure this out later this week or over the weekend, but if someone else (maybe with more Jekyll know-how) would like to give it a go before then, that would be even better! ;)

GitHub Actions Degraded Performance

GitHub Actions is currently experiencing degraded performance.

For us, it looks like new Actions are currently not being triggered and one Action (a validation) somehow got stuck. However, form submission and staticman seem unaffected and manually rerunning the latest build-deploy workflow works.

So currently no action needed on our part, but I'm monitoring the situation.

Links to Learning Materials

I was wondering if we want to link to something related to learning materials or courses in the main page's Other Resources section. I think you were suggesting something along these lines, @Lisanna?

Comments field (for edits)

Would it be possible to add another field to the end of the form for comments, which are displayed in the pull request but not actually added to the list record?

This could function as a simple way of enabling edits; someone who has previously submitted an entry can just submit a new entry and let us know that we should delete their previous record.

Thoughts?

Increasing Visibility 👓

A good number of experts have signed up since the launch 1 week ago, so scientists seeking support now have a good selection of volunteers they can choose to contact. 👍

That said, I think we should be looking to boost the list's visibility, in particular with crisis-affected scientists. Please use this issue to suggest ways of doing so (or report ways in which you have already done so).

• Make an entry in the EMBO list linking to our list
• Write to ASEEES to be included in their resources list
• ...

Application Error on form submission

I get the following error when filling the form with the example entries listed below and clicking submit.

Application error
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served.
If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command
heroku logs --tail

List entries:

• Name: Jonas Hartmann
• Affiliation: University College London (UCL)
• Country: United Kingdom (UK)
• E-mail: [email protected]
• Website: left empty
• Expertise: Test

I'm using Firefox.

Shuffling the list

It would be good if the list could be randomly shuffled each time it is displayed to avoid a situation where the top n volunteers receive 90% of all emails.

I'm guessing that this could be done by changing this for-loop

{% for member_name in site.data.members %} {% assign member = member_name[1] %}

to iterate over a shuffled version of site.data.members?

Member subpage

Implement a subpage for every member.

Advantages:

1. Can hold a comment section using utterances.
2. Will workaround the truncation issue with cards in the member list page (present since ed378b1 - to avoid card text overflow).
3. Hold additional (potentially verbose) information or fields that don't fit in the card.

Suggestions for Visual Improvements

I've done some basic styling and layouting; see PR #43 and issue #10.

I think it looks passable for now, but improvements would be welcome. We can use this issue to collect suggestions.

• A nice banner image at the top
• Better layout/style of the list itself
• Concept logo
• ...

Create a landing page for confirmation of submission

Currently a successful submission redirects to the homepage which can be confusing.

We should add a "Your information has been added and is pending validation".
We could also link to the Pull Request if we can get that information from staticman.

Duplicated submissions and edits

The current engine configuration treats every submission as unique as it includes a unique identifier in the filename.

We could use a different field but we would still need to have enough information to not have identity clashes.
All combinations I can think of have some form of caveat.
For instance:

• Name-Affiliation will likely not be unique enough.
• Email may be sufficient but will need manual update if members relocate.
• ...

We should also test if submitting different data (e.g. expertise) to an existing email record will be treated as an edit or something else will happen.

Is country essential?

Looking very good — nice work all!

Just played around with submitting researcher data and wondered whether we need country as an essential component? Might be easier to have timezone with a dropdown?

Similar projects

To be mentioned, linked, or to take inspiration from them:

• expat to expert
• EMBO list

Contact Email

We need a contact email. I'd be happy to give mine, but I think it would be better to create one that can be accessed by any of the repo's current and future maintainers.

I suppose we could just make a gmail account for this, unless anyone can think of any potential issues this might cause and/or of any better options?

Add Language Field

I think we should add another field in the list to declare languages spoken. Some people may be more comfortable speaking to a supporter in a language other than English.

That said, the language for the free-text Expertise field should be English only to facilitate moderation. I will add a note on this to the form when I work through issue #3.

Launch Discussion/Celebration 🚀

This thread is for celebrating the launch of our Expert Volunteer List and for minor comments, feedback, questions and discussion surrounding it.

🎉 🚀 🥳

(If you are looking to report notable bugs or make feature requests, please open a new issue specific to the bug or request.)

Code of Conduct Deployment Error

Since merging the Code of Conduct (PR #20), deployment fails with Error: Request failed with status code 400.

I've tried fixing the email links in the CoC and changing the way the title of the file is handled. I've also googled and looked file naming and cases, but didn't figure out what the problem is.

If anyone has a good idea about what's happening here, please respond or go ahead and fix it. Otherwise, I'll have to start systematically dissecting the CoC file and file name to see what works and what doesn't.

Unexpected Effects of Special Char Restrictions

I think they should only affect Name and Affiliation, as they're the fields that end up in file names. See also #193.