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Asked by anon-241014 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 10 Mar 2020.
Question: Have you ever worked on a large project? How did you commumicate with all the relevant people?
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Ben Cropper answered on 10 Mar 2020:
One good thing about nuclear physics is that collaborations are still quite small – it’s possible to have less than 10 names on a paper. Contrast that with particle physics – their collaborations are huge, because everyone in the ATLAS collaboration at CERN for example would go on a paper with ATLAS data.
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Tom Dally answered on 10 Mar 2020:
The project I’m working on now is the largest I’ve worked on, and that only has about 12-15 people involved. Even with this number it can be tricky to keep track of what everyone is doing by email and to sort out meetings. Some science collaborations can be huge, and I have no idea how they cope! It’s part of my job to keep up communication within my team, and making sure I was properly organised was one of the biggest learning curves for me!
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Emily Goddard answered on 10 Mar 2020:
Not really in my PhD, my project is quite small (well, it involves a whole company, but I only really speak to 4 or 5 people there). It will hopefully be commercialised and sold one day, so having a small team makes it easier to keep it secret!
Comments
Emily commented on :
Outside of science though, I organised the northern regional competition for University ballroom dancing last year. That involved a lot of people, not all in Edinburgh, and one not even in the same time zone! We made a lot of use of documents we could all edit together and follow the changes we’d made, and made sure everybody knew which jobs they had to do and had their own checklist. We also had teams working on different areas, with a key person in charge, so you knew immediately who to speak to for questions about their area. We did have meetings where everybody was together, but those were more overviews of what people had been up to, and we had smaller more detailed meeting for ‘specialist’ groups too.
Chris commented on :
My main research collaboration is large-ish in that it has people from seven different countries. It’s “only” around 20 people though. We communicate using email, the app called “Slack”, and video conference calls.
I also am involved with the computing facilities in CERN – so that is definitely a large project. Did you know that there’s over an exabyte of data stored by CERN? That’s more bytes than the number of seconds of time since the Big Bang!