The conduct is based on Titus Brown's version (with his permission).
All members of the lab, along with visitors, are expected to agree with the following code of conduct. We will enforce this code as needed. We expect cooperation from all members to help ensuring a safe environment for everybody.
The lab is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion (or lack thereof). We do not tolerate harassment of lab members in any form. Sexual language and imagery is generally not appropriate for any lab venue, including lab meetings, presentations, or discussions.
Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.
Members asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact Oliver Hofmann immediately. If Oliver is the cause of your concern Tiffany Broughtwood (tiffany.boughtwood at mcri.edu.au) is a good informal point of contact; she does not work for Oliver or the University of Melbourne and has agreed to mediate. For official concerns you should get in touch with HR directly:
The Inappropriate Workplace Behaviour Line http://mustaffcontactline.com.au/ is now available for employees to report inappropriate employee behaviour of unlawful discrimination, harassment, bullying, stalking, sexual assault, victimisation or vilification. Employees who experience or observe behaviours inconsistent with the University's Appropriate Workplace Behaviour Policy should, in the first instance, contact their HR manager, or if this is not an option, contact the Inappropriate Workplace Behaviour Line on 1800 685 463.
We expect members to follow these guidelines at any lab-related event.
Original source and credit: http://2012.jsconf.us/#/about & The Ada Initiative. Please help by translating or improving: http://github.com/leftlogic/confcodeofconduct.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
We try to keep day to day operations in the group as hassle-free as possible. Within the group, we try to practice lazy consensus (see Bethany's blog post). For most formal requests including time off, planning travel or spending money give Oliver 3 working days to respond before moving ahead. If it's urgent do get hold of Oliver via Slack and let him know that it is urgent.
That said, here are a few guidelines for:
I'm going to steal the answer to this one straight from the Whitaker lab page:
While I may be sending this email outside my normal office hours, I have no expectation to receive a reply outside yours.
You decide what time of the day you want to work. Group members are free to send Slack messages, email, pull requests and the like on evenings or over the weekend, but no group member is expected to reply to them outside of their typical work hours.
Group members are welcome to work flexibly for any reason. Ideally, all lab members will have at least a few hours each week to overlap with Oliver in order to stay in touch, but you are already self-motivated and don't need a traditional 9-to-5 day to get work done.
If you experience any challenges related to flexible working please contact Oliver. All communication will be treated as confidential.
The office environment can be noisy. While we are trying to improve this feel free to work from home, cafes, or any place that allows you to work without headphones.
Just remember to check into the Slack #general channel in the morning to let everyone know what you are up to, and try to make it to the office once a week or so for get-togethers or meetings.
If you ever need resources such as UMCCR shared drive and access-restricted data you may find UoM VPN useful.
Oliver is not keeping track of vacation days -- that's up to you. Shoot him an email before taking holidays, ideally as many days in advance as you want to be offline (e.g., for a two week vacation provide at least a two week heads up).
Have fun! And take those vacation days!
Rule of thumb - we can easily cover one (international) conference per year and person. Speak up in Slack or via email well in advance in case we have multiple team members who want to attend the same meeting.
All travel must be booked through the UniPortal site. Ideally use the group's credit card for conference charges, hotels and travel to avoid having to wait for reimbursement. Note that:
- All travel must be registered and booked through Unitravel.
- Always do this before your trip. Unitravel can’t be backdated. If your trip is paid for externally use the Log My Trip (incl. External Funded) option.
- Invoices relating to travel booked through Unitravel will come to you via this email address discovery.server@atpi.com
If travel is covered through an NHMRC grant things get a little bit more restrictive. You will be able to get an approval form from Angela McKellar that needs to completed and signed off before any international travel is undertaken; we need to keep those forms on file for audit purposes.
NHMRC Travel Guidelines also state that:
- Costs must be directly related to approved research objectives of the research activity
- Travel, accommodation, meals and incidentals must be in accordance with the University's travel policies
- Overseas travel requires formal approval prior to travel being undertaken
- Hard copies of completed forms, with supporting documents (the Travel Portal approval printout, Student Insurance approval, receipts and/or quotes for flights and accommodation) need to be scanned for local filing and emailed to resacc-NHMRC@unimelb.edu.au
- A copy of the signed approval form, plus supporting documents such as the Travel Portal printout, is to be included with the receipts that are attached to iexpense claims.
Phew. Hopefully we can find other means to fund your conference plans.
Most orders have to go through the Themis procurement portal. Shoot Oliver Hofmann an email with details of what you need and he'll try to get this ordered asap.
You can request reimbursement for all work-related expenses through Themis in the self-service section. Expenses for less than $80 AUD usually do not need a scanned copy of the bill, but keep it around just in case questions arise.
For purchases over $200 AUD get Oliver's approval first; this is mostly to avoid situations where we end up buying equipment or travel tickets that need to go through the procurement system. For purchases The lazy consensus approach applies for orders below $200.
Our default is set to open. Code ends up on GitHub under the MIT license, results are meant to be shared. We also encourage blogging, sharing information on Twitter, etc.
That said, keep in mind that most data we work with belongs to the patients, and some of our collaborators might have different preferences with regard to disseminating knowledge. If in doubt ask in Slack or via email.
We use Slack for pretty much all lab-related discussion. The amount of information can be a bit overwhelming, so as a starting point:
- Ideally, check in once a day with what you are up in #general.
- We try to keep non-work related chatter to the #random channel which is shared with the Boston team (Harvard School of Public Health Bioinformatics Core)
- #umccr-hbc is a shared channel with the Core for all things bcbio (our workflow system)
- #bioinfo is for coordinating our workflows and analysis, #rc for all things compute
If in doubt on whether to post something to a channel or to message someone, use the channel. Others can help answer many questions, and often everyone learns something new in the process.
Trello serves as a quick summary of projects and activities. Long term / vital information should migrate over to this wiki, but we keep track of the day to day activities in (currently) three Trello boards:
- Projects gives a 10k view of ongoing projects and activities. Ideally projects here link to one or more detailed implementation cards on our second Trello board, the
- Bioinformatics Trello which keeps track of what is active and pending along with intermediate results.
- The Train Trello contains one card per sequenced and processed sample (although we may take shortcuts for cohorts being sequenced)
Feel free to add cards, move things around and comment. Activities are reported in Slack #trello making it easy for everyone to follow. Hopefully.
You found the Wiki which means you have been added to the UMCCR organization already. We strongly recommend you create a repository for any and all active projects.
Themis is the University's portal for all things admin. You will need to use it for orders, reimbursements and a myriad of other things. Ask around for ongoing training sessions, they might be worth it.