Linear

Overview

Our goal in using Linear is that it can be a virtual / async gathering place for anything science- or fellows related that any of the past or current fellows care to share.

We think a similar structure could work well for other groups of scientists in or outside academia. This page is a crash course on how we’ve been using it (optimized mostly for brevity, so input on what to include in the future is solicited!).

For tips to get started with Linear, we use the team "onboarding" (this content is created by default in Linear). You can get to it in the leftmost navigation panel, under "Your teams". It has information (especially the first two issues, "ONB-1" and "ONB-2"), about various features you might find helpful.

The core unit of a Linear team is an "issue". So far, we have been using this similarly to a thread, and you can create and/or edit any of them (see below for some suggested examples). Once created, you can add further comments to the issue, and link out to other sources where that's natural (ex: overleaf, Google doc, Benchling file, GitHub repo)

Workspace setup

Here's what the workspace for each fellow typically contains:

[onboarding]
- ⁠goes to the basic linear onboarding channel
[fellows]
- goes to the shared fellows channel, to which all fellows + New Science team has access
[individual fellow]
- goes to your channel, to which you, anyone you add or would like added, + New Science team has access

Linear team structure

Some guidelines on how to structure your linear team:

- Project description == where to put your overall proposal/direction and any updates/pivots/addenda that you like
- Current progress == where I put meeting notes and you can add anything async
- [troubleshooting direction 1] == a place to put plans, data, related to this troubleshooting
- [experiment direction 1] == a place to put plans, results, related to this experiment
- [literature exploration 1] == a place to put notes and thoughts related to this topic

The hope is that these [direction X] can turn into modules of technical reports (research.newscience.org) with minimal additional labor.

At any time, fellows can add any other “issues” to their own channel or the shared fellows channel that they find interesting or helpful.

We hope to include a project demo soon to illustrate in greater detail how we use some of these features especially around collaboration. If you use this structure and have thoughts on it, we'd love to hear about it 🙂