Apr202016April 20, 2016April 20, 20161Commentby L.

Slack software for labs

Posted in Software, Tips

slack

Slack is very useful team coordination software. It’s been such a help in my own lab, that I suspect that given a properly configured Slack account, I could simultaneously run GE, Google, Intel, and the US Federal Government.

It’s easy to dismiss Slack. To a large extent, it’s basically a bunch of chat rooms. I wasn’t interested in it at first, when my marketing executive sister first told me about it (around 2013, shortly after it was first released). She liked it for coordinating her team. At the time, my lab was small, and I didn’t need another channel of communication. But recently I’ve taken it on, and it has been an exceptionally positive thing for my lab.

I needed to push out several papers in a short period of time, and emailing people was clumsy and slow. Slack was perfect. I started using it then and it was transformative for that little bit of last minute dotting i’s and crossing t’s. We could exchange figure files, images, data, comments, etc. and it was all categorized by project, and had a nice timeline/history layout for browsing back through it. It’s also nice to search-by-project, rather than searching my entire email archive. Slack made it so much better.

I can tell you a few reasons why Slack is useful, and I will below. But really, you should just try it yourself. It’s free to try. See if you find it useful. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.

It’s basically a team communications platform. You can set up as many channels as you like, for example, one channel per project. Within each channel, you can exchange messages. In practice, they tend to be brief and text message-like, but they can be longer. You can also exchange images, files, links, etc.

I like it for several reasons:

  • Everyone can see what’s going on in lab.
  • All of the discussions, files, screenshots, etc. about a particular project are all in one place. So if I need to bring someone into a project, I don’t have to find the dozens of email threads about the project and forward them. I can just have the new person browse the history of the project’s channel.
  • The text message-like informality makes quick exchanges much easier. Email is a bit old fashioned and slow. It’s a bit formal, even (compared to other electronic communication, anyways). Chat/text messaging is more immediate and faster.
  • Comments are editable and can even be deleted, which is handy for typos and general garbage control. There is also the risk of destroying information, but that’s relatively small in practice, I think.
  • Slack easily integrates with other tools like Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox, etc. Even PubMed links are automatically expanded with the paper title and other information.
  • They have software for desktop (Windows, OSX, Linux) and mobile (iOS, Android, Windows Phone).

    • Here are some basic rules I follow right now. I have no great basis for these, it’s just what seems to work now:

  • One Team for the lab, and separate Teams for external collaborations (I’m part of an IARPA project, and that’s in a different team). Billing is by team, so this makes billing for collaborations more straightforward. It also makes it clear when we’re sharing info outside of the lab.
  • Minimal use of private channels. It’s fine to use them when appropriate (e.g., notes on fellowship applications), but don’t default to them. For example, don’t send me data figures in a private channel.
  • We have some general channels (e.g., optical_design, headfixed_behavior), but we mostly try to use project-specific channels. Roughly speaking, one paper per channel, or at least one paper at a time per channel. We need to actively suppress the haphazard creation of new channels.
  • We have a channel called “papers” where everyone is free to dump whatever interesting paper they want to.
  • There’s a “purchasing” channel that my assistant uses to track down paperwork and deal with ordering. That has been handy. This channel and some of the others were started by people in my lab. They were wise choices. So I’m going to keep letting people start their own channels. I’m the only person who can invite people to the team, but as long as my team keeps doing a clean job of starting channels, I’ll let them do that.

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