Tyler McInnes - Converting Posit-Enthusiasm into Posit-Action

Ko Hikurangi te maunga, eru nei taku ngākau. Ko Whananaki te awa, e mahia nei aku māharahara. No Whangarei, Aotearoa, New Zealand ahau. Ka mihi au ki ngā tāngata whenua o tēnei rohe, Suquamish me Duwamish me Skokoma. Ko McInnes tōku whānau, ko Tyler tōku ingoa. Kia ora!

Hello everyone. What you've just heard is a pepiha and this is the traditional way to make connections using the indigenous language of Aotearoa called te reo Māori. And what this kind of translates to is saying the bones of my ancestors rest in these places and it's a way for two strangers to meet and to find common ground.

Now, confidence in embracing the indigenous language of my home country, it's not something that I expected to get when last year I travelled to PositConf 2023. But this is one of the things that I took away from my experiences. In this talk I'm going to share some of my experiences from PositConf last year and the things that it inspired me to do.

So last year I came on to PositConf and it was just this incredible experience. You know, I was meeting all of these amazing people and they were up on stage and they were talking about all of the things they were doing, all the tools that they were building and the ways that they were helping people. And I felt really lifted up and I felt built up by this community of people.

And I distinctly remember I was listening to a talk by Millie Sims called The Side Effects of Blogging for a Year. And I wrote down, build myself a practice website. I knew that what I really wanted to write was blog for a year like my new idol Millie, but I'm at least something of a realist so I wrote down a more modest build a practice website. And this was just one of a whole lot of tasks that I set myself during the talks. I was really excited and then I took my flight home.

And let me tell you that there's nothing quite like 12 hours alone on a plane to make you question things. I started to ask myself, you know, was this really feasible? Could I get these tasks done? In other words, could I convert this conference enthusiasm into action?

And I won't keep you in suspense. In a lot of cases, I didn't complete all my tasks. And I think that this is probably something that people in the audience can relate to. You know, we sit out with the best of intentions. We want to do more or we want to be better. And for whatever reason, we don't get everything done that we planned. And this can be really challenging. It can actually be quite a disheartening feeling.

But I'm not disheartened because I've had some real successes in the last year. And the theme is that my successes all came about when I connected with my local community. So that's what this talk is. It's three short stories about things that I was inspired to do at Posit last year and how I connected with my community to do so. And these three stories are around connecting with the indigenous language back home, around starting a community-led meeting, and building a website.

But I'm not disheartened because I've had some real successes in the last year. And the theme is that my successes all came about when I connected with my local community.

About Genomics Aotearoa

And I did all of these things in the context of my job, so I'll tell you a bit about that. I worked for a group called Genomics Aotearoa. And I might use this term Aotearoa. This is the indigenous name for New Zealand. I'll use either Aotearoa or New Zealand. And Genomics Aotearoa is this collaborative research platform. So it brings together researchers from all across the country, researchers from our universities and our major research institutes, brings them together to collaborate on a whole lot of diverse projects, projects like working on improving local agriculture or things like the sequencing of this national treasure that you can see, this beautiful indigenous flightless bird, the kākāpō, which turns up in the strangest of places.

And for Genomics Aotearoa, I work as one of two bioinformatics training coordinators. And that means that I work with a team of people to oversee a whole series of workshops to train members of the community. And we've had more than 1,900 people attend our workshops since 2019, and that's a large number for New Zealand. And people have attended everything from like what is an R object through to really specialised, focused methods on things like genome assembly. We build our workshops with buy-in from both the local and the international community to make sure that we've got the most up-to-date skills and ideas. And right now we're in this really exciting phase. We're in the lead up to our 100th workshop, and it's a milestone that we're all very excited for back home.

Embracing te reo Māori

All right, so that's the context of what I do and what I was doing. So let's take a look at some of these tasks that I set myself. Now, this first one looks ridiculously easy. Send a message to Angie Reid. And yes, that's Angie who we just heard from earlier in the session. And Angie actually spoke at PositConf 2023. And when she did so, she introduced herself using the language of the Penobscot people with whom she'd been working so closely. And Angie said that this was the first time that she'd used the language to introduce herself. And I thought, wow, first time at a big conference. That takes a lot of courage and shows a real commitment.

And Angie also said that prior to using the language, she'd spoken with a local language keeper to ask, is it appropriate for her to do so? And the language keeper said, it is appropriate. It's a form of reconciliation. Now, this message really stood out to me. And so I wanted to contact Angie and say how important this was to me personally.

But I am very shy. And I, you know, when it comes to contacting a stranger out of the blue over email, I'm not very good at that. So I didn't get around to contacting Angie. But this message had really stuck with me. And so over time, my task kind of changed. It morphed into this idea to embrace the indigenous language and culture back home and to do so in such a way that I could create a more welcoming training environment.

Now, I knew how I could do this. And this was to start using karakia. So I should say I was already using that pepeha that you heard. I was using that in certain situations. And I learned that a little while ago. But I wanted to do more. And I wanted to start to use karakia. So karakia are blessings to open and close meetings. And they're a way to recognize, you know, the spirits and our ancestors in the environment that we're in.

I knew that I should be using these. But I myself am not an indigenous person. I didn't grow up speaking te reo Maori. And I didn't grow up learning te ao Maori, the worldview. So whenever I thought about using karakia, I felt like an imposter. And so I wasn't sure what to do. But I then followed in Angie's lead. And I spoke to a local knowledge keeper. In this case, our knowledge keeper is called the Vision Matauranga Manager, Tracy Godfrey. And Vision Matauranga Manager, that's an employed role by Genomics Aotearoa to make sure that all of the work that we do is done in consultation with and in alignment with the values of indigenous Maori people.

And Tracy, she very patiently but somewhat chidingly told me that, yes, Tyler, you should be using karakia. And I got an opportunity. Coming up, we had our annual general meeting. And I was leading a sub-meeting within this for our early career researchers. And I practiced and practiced and practiced these karakia. On the day everybody sits down, I stand up to open the meeting. And I just could not find the first word.

And you might be familiar with this feeling. You can't force your brain to remember something in a situation. I see the nods. Thank you. I had to pull out some notes. And as soon as I see the first word, it was okay. But, you know, the whole thing was deeply embarrassing for me. And where did I feel like an imposter at that moment? And because I'd opened the meeting with a karakia, however poorly, I was obligated to close the meeting with a karakia. And I remember the dread of doing that close.

When I started, the closing karakia has a call and a response. And a person in the audience, just one, they joined in with that response. And the moment they did, it shifted my perspective. And I was reminded, you know, this wasn't about me. It didn't actually really matter how I felt. This was about the step of reconciliation. And importantly, I realized that, you know, at least for one person there, I had made this a more welcoming and a familiar space.

Now, I have listed this as a task. Truth is, I know this isn't a task, you know, this is a journey. Sometimes a very challenging one to be on. But it's one that I'm very glad to have embarked on myself. And one I encourage anybody to take their first steps down.

Connecting the community

So the second task, all around the idea of connecting the community. So Aotearoa is a beautiful country. It's also, it's very tall and thin. We are extremely geographically isolated. And this applies to individuals as well. It's really hard to get together in person. And so I was thinking about this when I was listening to a talk last year by Natalia Andrychuk talking about the idea of connecting the bioinformatics community at Pfizer. And Natalia had said that she found success by using things like Package of the Month. You know, you bring people together to learn about a technique, but really you're connecting the community. And the quote that really got me was, when building the community, connecting people and their experiences is vital.

when building the community, connecting people and their experiences is vital.

And so I wanted to do something like this. And I thought, right, I could start this, like, self-sustaining, self-driving meeting. You know, we'll have content by the community, for the community. It's going to be really great. And I got home and I thought about it a bit more and I realized, like, a lot of really good people have already tried this. And so all of a sudden I felt very vain. Like, who am I to do this? Who am I to make this succeed? And I put that idea on the back burner for a little while.

And it would have stayed there, but I had a kind of a run-in with a fellow colleague and a fellow trainer, a guy called Dr. Murray Kadzow. We were just standing in the stairwell of all places and we were talking. I'd seen this piece of code and I was telling Murray I was really excited. And then he got really excited. And we said, this is all we really need to do as trainers, right? We just need to get people excited about these little things, the stuff that we find exciting, because data science is very cool. And this gave me the push and the enthusiasm to start building a little workshop. A really short workshop. I called it Publication Quality Plots with ggplot2. It was like, who doesn't like a nice figure to draw people in? But secretly I was trying to connect people and their experiences.

So I spent a long time working on this workshop. Now, a lot of our workshops, we run them on Zoom. Because of this highly dispersed community, it's easiest to bring them together on Zoom. And when I run a Zoom meeting, I try and run it from home because my normal work environment is an active research community. Now, I love being part of a living, breathing, fire alarm tripping community. But when I'm running a Zoom meeting, it's nice to be at home because it's a more controllable environment.

So there I am. I've just done my intro. Everybody's ready to learn. And then I notice, oh, a few people are frozen. Actually, everybody's frozen. Oh, I have frozen. And I realize that I am mid-power cut. This is not the start that I wanted.

So cue montage. I'm running around the house. I've got my phone in one hand. I'm texting Murray. And I'm going to put my shoes on with the other. I'm going to dash across town. I run up three flights of stairs. I sign in. I'm like... And I log in and Murray is there. He's serenely running this meeting. And he says, I will let Tyler catch his breath. And he can take over with this training.

So I'm describing this like it was a total disaster. And certainly to me, that is what it felt like in the moment. But we collected feedback. And our feedback said that most people were pretty happy with what they'd learned. They'd learned the basics of ggplot. That was what they really wanted. But I felt dejected because I felt like I'd failed in my idea to connect people and their experiences.

I needed to console myself. So naturally, I went down to get a coffee. And I opened the tearoom door to the sound of loud laughter. And there was my fellow trainer, Murray, recounting the story of a power card. And sort of telling everybody how slushed I looked. Yeah, it's quite embarrassing. But, you know, we sat around and we talked a lot about workshops and training. As we were leaving, someone said, that's actually a really good idea for another meetup. We'll get everybody together and we'll share our training horror stories. Because we've all got them.

And so I don't know if this is necessarily going to become a self-sustaining community meetup. But right now I've got at least a little bit of community buy-in. All it cost was a lot of stress and a little bit of dignity. Which is a small price to pay.

Building a Quarto website

My last task is actually the first task I mentioned. And it's this one where I wanted to build a practice website. And I wrote this when I was listening to Millie's talk, the side effects of blogging for a year. Hugely impactful talk for me. I think it was probably my favourite from the conference. So I wanted to build this practice website. And I wanted to combine this with a couple of my other tasks. To work on Quarto. Because I'd done the Intro to Quarto workshop. Amazing. And then I also wanted to communicate the success of the training program that I'm a part of. So I put all these together. And this was technically the first task that I completed.

Now I say technically. Because one of the things that I really admire about ggplot and Quarto. And the Tidyverse in general. Is that it's all really beautiful. It's also well made. It's admirable. Mine was not. I actually took this website down out of shame. I think I deleted the whole repo. Which is bad. And that would have been the very end of my Quarto journey.

And I wish for the sake of narrative. There was this lightbulb moment. Some critical task that required a Quarto website to fix things. That's not really what happened. I guess after Posit I'd been following a lot of blogs. And I was following people on LinkedIn. And I was seeing this steady stream of high quality material. This must have been kicking around in the back of my head. Because at some point I wanted to find a way. To just kind of record all of the stuff that I do in my private life. All my hobbies and my blog. All my hobbies. And this was everything from recording stuff that I was painting for my friends. And data from board games that I was playing. And the food that I was harvesting from the garden. And so I built this really quick Quarto website. Almost without thinking. It was very basic. But then I started to add different fonts. And I changed the background colors. Every now and then I'd reach a milestone. So I'd start a new page. And then I'd just sort of write down all these big ideas. When I realized I'd essentially been blogging for almost a year.

And this was a really profound moment for me. Because it didn't matter that this particular blog only has a viewership of one. For me this was a task that I had said don't try this. Don't even write this down. And yet I made this thing. And I did it entirely on the back of the enthusiasm from my online community. Which was really important.

So I would never under any circumstances show anyone my private hobby blog. But I would like it if you'd take a look at this. It's a work in progress. This is a website that I'm building to communicate the training program that I'm a part of. So you can take a look at this. You can learn a bit more about the work that we do. You can learn about Genomics Aotearoa. And you can meet the training team itself. I've got sort of LinkedIn details for all of the team members. This QR code is repeated at the end as well, by the way.

Closing thoughts

Okay. So what am I trying to say with this talk? Well, there are two things. And the first is that conferences are so much more than knowledge sharing. They're an opportunity for us to connect with one another. To feel excited. To sort of get built up by the community around us. And that's amazing.

Conferences are a real luxury. They're not our day-to-day reality. And I think that it's only when we come home and we reconnect with the people who we see on a day-to-day basis. They're the ones who laugh at us. They're the ones who pick us up when we're down. And it's with the people who are closest to us that we really reaffirm what's important to us. And it's through them that we tend to achieve our goals.

And it's with the people who are closest to us that we really reaffirm what's important to us. And it's through them that we tend to achieve our goals.

Now, I'll use that sort of message around my local community to segue into my last slide. Where I repeat this photo of the team of people that I work with. Acknowledging both the company that I work for. Our close partners. The New Zealand eScience infrastructure. And you've got some links that you can use to look at our website. To meet the rest of the team. And connect with me on LinkedIn if you'd like. Thank you.

Q&A

As you guys are asking questions, as a rinder, this is our last session before lunch. Ask all the questions. Now you have all of lunch to answer questions for people.

As we're waiting and refreshing the page, what is your favorite thing that you wrote about on your secret, secret blog? Oh, my secret, secret blog. It's got to be gardening. So my partner and I, we garden at home. And it's been really nice to sort of engage with the environment. And start to grow our own food. And it's been incredible to see just the amount of things that we've been able to make. And it's only by sort of looking back at it that it sort of like really hits home.

This is not a question. I just really want to acknowledge how amazing you are. Truly, you brought tears to my eyes. So thank you for sharing. And truly, it's amazing that you did all that you did. Because that is not easy on so many levels. So I can completely relate. So really, truly, thank you.

Thank you.

If you have questions for Tyler, feel free to throw them on Discord. Are you raising your hand? Alright, we'll do five questions from the crowd.

I appreciate that you brought this up in your talk. And I'm wondering if you can say more about your experience being a white man. Starting that journey of learning the language and reconciliation.

Yeah, so this was quite challenging. It's actually something that I've had multiple kind of little things that contributed to this. I've had lots of times when I've spoken to people who have given really good pieces of advice. So a really important point. One thing that I've been taught is that we have this tendency to say like the indigenous culture. But that's quite wrong. Back home, there are lots of different Maori groups who have their own traditions and opinions. And that can be challenging because it's hard to know. There is not one right way. So some people might not necessarily agree with the idea of me using a pepiha. Some people might say that I should do a pepiha. But it would be quite different to if it was used by an indigenous person. It's been difficult. But by speaking to lots of people, it's helped to understand that there are different points. And then by, I think, just sort of trying to find the consensus. I've also received a really positive thought, which is that intention is very important. So by having the right intention, that goes a long way. Personally, that helped a lot because, you know, no one wants to make a mistake and to blunder or to offend anyone. But hearing that my intention was very important, that helped a lot.

All right. We have one short question and then we'll have one more before lunch. What's your favorite board game? Oh, yeah. So I had it in the photo there. Favorite board game has been Wingspan. Played this over Christmas and played like 500 times since. So, yeah, it's really nice. Very, very fun. Beautiful artwork. Really nice theme of looking after the environment. It's got everything.

And before we release everyone to lunch, the people want to know, do you have any goals that you have set for this conference? Yeah. Luckily, I did think I thought about this because I thought this might be a question that will come up. Yeah. So in the keynote yesterday, you know, there was this demonstration of producing some of these documents that can be used to give people opportunity to answer questions and to provide hints and things. So in the workshops that we run, you know, I often think about how workshops work as a style of learning. And I like this idea that we could try and incorporate workshops or something that gives people an opportunity to test their knowledge kind of in real time a little bit more quickly. So I like the idea of incorporating that into the workshops that we run and see how that works for people's learning experience. Thank you so much. One more round of applause for Tyler and we'll all go to lunch.