Alena Reynolds - bRewing code: Ingredients for successful tribal collaboration

I'm Elena Reynolds. I'm so happy to be here. I work for the Skokomish tribe here in Washington State, and I work as their water quality program coordinator. And this time last year, I was starting to get ready to put together our water quality report.

And after talking to my supervisor and my colleagues, I really decided I wanted to do this in R. And I had taken college classes that incorporated that into the curriculum as well as taking some online workshops, but it never really got it to stick for me.

And I realized this time I was going to have to learn how to do it on my own.

And back then when I was taking those courses, I would do all kinds of stuff to try to address these errors, to just make the magic happen, including this.

Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble, fillet of a finny snake in the cauldron boil and bake. I am newt and toe of frog, wing of bat and tongue of dog, for a charm of powerful trouble, hell broth boil and bubble.

And needless to say, this didn't work.

And I realized something this time around, that I didn't want to do this alone.

So I decided to apply for and I did receive technical assistance through the tribal coding enhanced tribal exchange group. Exactly.

And that's how I met Angie.

Introducing the collaboration

Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Elena. And it's been a real pleasure to help her not be alone. Kwe, Ndiliwezi, Angie Reed. I work for Penobscot Indian Nation. And although I'm not an enrolled tribal citizen, I introduced myself in the Penobscot language in honor of a long term friend and one of the youngest language keepers in Penobscot Nation, Gabe Paul. So he's taught me that to use a language is actually a form of reconciliation. So since around 2004, I've been the Penobscot Nation's water resources planner and I'm also the vice chair of the tribal exchange network group, or you'll probably hear TXG later on in our presentation.

So the free assistance that Elena is talking about was made possible through funding from the Environmental Protection Agency. And this is how we came to spend a whole lot of time together, brewing code together. Based on my experience over the past many years and even before Elena, around 150 hours of one-on-one assistance with other tribal environmental professionals, I really have come to believe that it's incredibly helpful. So I knew she would like to have an R buddy when she was programming. So, and I've just had so much fun serving this role too. Another theme that you might imagine is coming on this presentation.

And so, but to be sure, while we wanted our theme of fun and bringing humor to our work to be in this presentation, make no mistake that this work is a very serious endeavor. The people who we work for, it makes a huge difference to try to protect traditional tribal lifeways.

The recipe: perspective

So this, what we're doing as a recipe for success has been fine-tuned over the past few years. Like Elena described, the product that many tribal water quality programs need is a water quality assessment report, sometimes produced on an annual basis, sometimes not as frequently. So we've broken down the essential ingredients to this annual water quality report into three main categories of perspective, ownership, and connection. Like recipes have separate goals for mixing groups of ingredients, we're going to start with perspective and put those in a separate bowl.

So our first step in this process together was to discuss what Elena's vision was. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, Elena? Yes. Thanks, Angie. And I talked to Seth a little bit about this, who is my supervisor, you'll see him later. And he really workshopped this way of putting it in a really nice way that was, that you can really increase the quality, efficiency, comparability, and reduce the time needed in order to complete any reporting processes, including our water quality report. Yeah. And with sometimes water quality programs are one person shops, so it helps us a lot, a lot at the same time.

So the next step was to decide how Elena wanted to get to that vision and set some goals. Tell us a little bit about what you thought were your first goals. Well, Angie, you had shown me your water quality report and you've had used rmarkdown to combine code and narrative. I thought that was really neat. And others had had a success using rmarkdown as well. So I really wanted to give that a try. Great. That's great.

Ownership: working with your own data

So in another bowl, we're going to combine some different ingredients that we're in a category we're calling ownership. With a very start, and this is the advantage of working on one-on-one as well. From the very start, we worked with getting Elena's data into and out of the database that actually the Skokomish Nation actually uses. So tell us a little bit more what it was like to work with your own data. Yeah. Since I use my own data, my own bacteria samples that I collected, as well as the physical water quality results, such as dissolved oxygen, I was able to prioritize this project and more consistently work on it. Also, my motivation stayed higher because I had collected this data and I had worked in these areas and I knew these sites for some years of my career at that point. Yeah. It actually just really works well into your whole flow of your day. It's not a separate process.

So absolutely none of this would have been possible without the person that Elena mentioned just a bit ago, her boss, Seth. I will absolutely never forget the first time I introduced, I had a meeting with these guys and I introduced the topic of what Tribal Exchange Network Group could offer for assistance. He was amazingly enthusiastic and immediately said, oh, we need to do this. So how has it been having such an amazingly supportive boss? It is so fantastic, Angie. Seth brings that enthusiasm to everything he does. And it's just so motivating. He also has been super supportive and allowed the time and consistently, consistently to work on these reports and my scripting as well. And he would just ask questions and just show his enthusiasm. And that really demonstrated his investment in our progress.

So we also had a definite sense of how long it can take. This is not your typical way of doing things. So we actually planned weekly meetings and just planned, scheduled out like over months. So sometimes you can make it, sometimes you can't, but we wanted to have enough frequent time. So did this really help your learning skills? It was so critical, Angie. After I was able to spend about an hour with you each week and then spend at least another couple of hours working on my scripting. And after some time, I was able to start putting the pieces together. So I would unconsciously start thinking about how to come up with solutions while I was driving, while I did dishes. I even woke up in the middle of the night one time and thought, oh, this function is going to fix it. It was a big investment and I was super motivated by your and Seth's support. It really gave me that sense of autonomy.

It was a big investment and I was super motivated by your and Seth's support. It really gave me that sense of autonomy.

Connection and fun

So as you might imagine, spending this much time together really deepens the connection you make with somebody. And it has, in addition to us, it's really provided a great springboard for working with other tribal environmental professionals.

So we really think that fun is the most underestimated ingredient. When you're having fun, your stress levels are just going to automatically go down. You're going to be able to think more critically, use your higher brain power, and you'll have a lot more RAM speed and energy to use in that process. You'll also be able to access that creative flow more easily, which allows a lot more connections to be made to the material and also what you're doing. And that's one of the cornerstones of learning and retention.

So we really think that fun is the most underestimated ingredient. When you're having fun, your stress levels are just going to automatically go down. You're going to be able to think more critically, use your higher brain power, and you'll have a lot more RAM speed and energy to use in that process.

So to give you an example of our fun and to also give you a bit of a background behind the title of our talk, one session, Angie and I were working together and it happened to be Halloween. I was wearing this. I'd forgotten, but she took one look at it and said, oh, I want one. So I immediately had to send her one.

In addition to that, I also really wanted to say thank you to Angie because she's put so much time, effort, energy, not to mention patience, into being able to work with me. So I decided to use my knitting skill to knit her and I matching coding mitts.

And you can't really see these from down there, although hers are a little bit more contrast, but they have like ours knitted into the cuffs and some little stitches on the top and the little arrow on the top. So it also brings me a great joy to wear these when I'm at home, especially when I have a tough day. I go, okay, I'm going to go put my mitts on and make myself feel better.

So I also understood how much, again, time it's going to take to do this on a one-on-one basis. So it really does take more time, but I truly have come to believe that this is way more critical than I think any of us think. So it's not to say that you shouldn't take workshops or trainings, but at the very least having this level of follow-up with somebody so that they can use their own data and in a timeframe that's more just in their general workflow makes a huge difference. How did you feel about that? So by working with you, Andy, it was so critical for me.

I was able to ask you questions, express frustrations, which I'm sure we've all experienced, and also voice concerns and address errors as they came up. I was also able to ask you to repeat yourself as much as I needed to, which you can only do once or twice in a classroom setting.

But that really allowed me to build my confidence and I was able to take that confidence not only in my coding, but also through my professional life and even into my personal life.

Combining the ingredients

So that confidence really built up over time and then I could take those skills and knowledge that we cultivated together into the next steps and move on to more complex tasks. As an example, Angie and I were working and she used Stack Overflow. She worked with me and showed me how to use it. And she did this with a lot of other tools and softwares, but this was really helpful in that I could use that to apply to other aspects of my reports. So we used ggplots as an example to add a horizontal line to my legend and then I used it later to be able to make facet grids and all these kinds of more complex graphs.

So as you can see on the slide, we were putting this all into one big rmarkdown file. Now, in fairness, Quarto had not been around when I first started doing my own reports for Penobscot Nation, so we were using rmarkdown for that reason. Probably we have already talked about probably moving it to Quarto at some point. So you combine it in one big rmarkdown report, you stir in some scripts, and you rearrange for over 100 or 1,000 hours, depending on how particular you are.

So with using the skills you and I honed together, I was able to complete my water quality report. I learned so many new skills and specialized aspects of those along the way, and I was able to cycle those back to Angie, as well as the budding coding community we were fostering together.

So if you follow these instructions, you are pretty assured of getting a delicious water quality assessment report that not only builds confidence in the learner, for sure, strong friendships, as you can see, and skills that are applicable to, as Elena said, a variety of other projects. So you want to store this code in a cold and safe place so that you can use it to reproduce your reports again and again. You also can take the scripts and the narrative into new R projects in the future. And probably most importantly, you want to share it, right? And Elena's already doing this.

Role switching and TXG

So after working with Angie for about eight months, I was able to join TXG myself to provide technical assistance to others. Yeah. And one of those people that she's providing technical assistance is to me, because she learned a lot about sending stuff to Word that we all need in our department. So it's going to be amazing. So truly, the learner has become the teacher.

So as we talked about, Tribal Exchange Network Group, EPA provides us funding. And so we actually, for all of the over 570 tribes throughout the United States, federally recognized tribes, we get funding to help them with any aspect of data management or exchange, as well as helping to write exchange network grants to help them fund doing any of these tasks. So in addition to the stuff we talked about, we've talked about just now in this presentation, we also have done the two to three day trainings like Carpentries with a sort of general generic data set and a larger group of people. But we also have some small group, what we call data drop-in sessions. They're on a monthly basis. They're only an hour. And you can just bring any questions you have.

So if you actually would, shameless plug, like I did last year, if you're interested in joining us to help provide this to, again, the many, many tribal programs that are out there. Last count, I think there are 271 water programs. There's not many of us at TXG. Feel free to scan this code and you can sign up at the Google Forum that it brings you to. Last year, we had about 25 people sign up at PositConf. And some of those already participated in some of our TXG events this year.

One of the people with whom we reconnected last year was Julie from Openscapes. In addition to generally talking about how we might collaborate with Openscapes, Julie introduced us to Allison Horst, sort of one of our little dreams come true. So during the Halloween session that Elena discussed, I was reminded of one of Allison's illustrations, the wizard, our markdown one. I showed it to her and I said, yeah, this cool, crazy idea of making a temporary tattoo out of it. And so need a high resolution image of that. So Julie introduced us to Allison and then we all got together to talk.

So Allison loved the notion of doing this temporary tattoo, but even better than we had imagined, was also open to doing a custom illustration for us. So in return for that custom illustration, I am so, so honored that Allison was happy to receive her own custom coding mitt, as well as her own hat.

Truly amazing. So in the image that she created, how many little Easter eggs did we have? We had about 25. After we talked to Allison, we were able to embed 25 Easter eggs. We'll see if you can spot them all. And that includes sample bottles and a salmon. So the big reveal, this is the first time anybody's ever seen this in real life.

Isn't it so great? It really is. We are totally in love with this. It really, and we also have hex stickers, sticker versions. We also have a table up on the seventh floor. We've been sort of doling out these a little bit at a time. So you can have some today too here, but we'll also leave some more up at the table. So to round this out, this image really does bring together all of what we've talked about today, and really all of what we do in our work, working on rivers, we're taking data, collecting data. But honestly, the most important thing for us is brewing this code together and what it has brought to all of us. So we really appreciate you having some fun with us today. Go brew together. Thank you.

I think we'll have time for one question slash request is, can you please share the knitting pattern for the mitts? Oh, okay. Good question. I didn't anticipate that. I've been inspired by Andy's colleague, um, Lori Baker, Lori Baker, who has created a Quarto knitting pattern. I would like to do this. And that way you can plug in your own gauge, your own just everything and be able to make this work when, when you want to. So that's my dream. So yes, email us and we'll get back to you. We don't have it yet. Yes. It's a little complicated. I'm trying to iron that out.