What do we do in our dugnad?

It’s entirely up to you! This is time to collectively improve your shared environment. Your group probably already has ideas about what good parts of your software and practices could become great, and what…not-so-good things there are that could also be improved. If you haven’t already explicitly discussed this, you might want to set aside half an hour at the beginning of your dugnad to discuss what there is to be done and to record a list of activities: that’s actually how we built this template dugnad!

Examples of Dugnad Success

Sharing knowledge and practice

  • Postdoc A and PhD student B both use an old F77 simulations code. Postdoc A has some scripts to make it easier to create input files, which, motivated by B, they document and add to the group repository.

  • New PhD student Z sits with finishing PhD student Y and learns some basic version control skills.

  • PI notices that Postdoc C could use an obscure option in the F77 monster that would make it run a bit faster, though without changing scientific results (and hence they’d never discussed it before).

  • The PI sees how amazing sustainable software practices are, even internally, and becomes evangelical.

  • A PhD student went on a Python course and learned to use a new library for fancy interactive plotting. They give a short demonstration and help other group members try it out on their own plots.

Adopting new practice

  • PhD student X is excited to try out Continuous Integration, having read about the practice on the Software Sustainability Institute blog. Postdoc B agrees to help build a CI workflow for their simulation code, and they demonstrate it to the rest of the team.

Updating the marketing

  • Latest results and project ideas can be added to the University or Group webpage to advertise to potential collaborators, hires and funders. Makes the group look more active.

  • New postdoc B has joined from a slightly different research area but quickly survey’s the group’s public webpages and creates a list of changes to request from IT.

Improving team cohesion

  • Everyone can bring snacks and cake! Maybe have a cheese and biscuit day or encourage celebration of diverse backgrounds by asking everyone to bring a food from their hometown.

Sharing with the wider community

  • Someone found and fixed an obscure bug in an external code. More experienced Git users can help them learn how to push that back to the main repository so the developers and wider community benefit from the fix.

  • A postdoc is about to release a new code and has written documentation. Other group members can try to install and use it following their documentation and point out where they get confused or any problems that crop up on different platforms: improving the documentation and re-usability for the research community.