Here are some very interesting suggestions for having a good IT system in your lab (Github, Wiki, website, emails etc.). I’m sure the Mastodon crowd will love these:
https://fraserlab.com/2024/04/22/IT-suggestions-for-new-faculty/
Source: future PI slack, from the #FraserLab
These are good ideas.
Just a warning, though. When you build your lab, you will have a great IT system. It will be elegantly designed, and will be light-years ahead of your PI's structure. And you will wonder how they ever got along without it... until 25 years later, you realize your IT system is now a hodgepodge of duct tape and out-of-date systems that are not nearly as good as the new faculty are designing, and you will realize that updating it would require taking the entire system offline for more than a year and none of your postdocs would accept the new structure...
Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do your best to set things up as carefully as you can when you start. Just a view from down the road. :)
TBH, I don't know. I think yearly review would be a good technique to try.
What I have done is added things over the years. It's not so hard when it's an entirely new thing. For example, we added a Wiki about a decade ago. That worked really well. I recently added checks to the lab database so that new stuff at least is in a consistent format... for a while. In my experience, the problem is less one of adding as much as deciding when to retire something or deciding whether it is worth fixing legacy structures.
A major issue is when to let go of data taking hundreds of terabytes of space, and no one in the lab remembers what exactly it is, and the associated metadata and documentation (a wiki page) was lost some time ago or no longer makes sense. One never has time to go through these.
I do not have a good solution. The solution I'd want is an annual review of data, tied with the 5-year cycle of data servers (that's how long they're expected to last).
El Duvelle
Redish Lab
Albert Cardona
Eli Roberson (he/him)