ICES Training Course: Reimagining complex data-intensive reports

Application deadline: 27 April 2026

​​​This 5-day in-person workshop is designed to help diverse teams - that have a variety of roles and skills, transition to collaborative and reproducible workflows for their data-driven reports. This workshop blends the Openscapes Champions Program with the NOAA Fisheries RVerse hands-on skill-building clinics. During the workshop, participants will learn and use Quarto (next-gen R Markdown, now for R, Python or Julia) and GitHub to develop a reproducible report tailored to the participant’s own goals.

The focus is on creating welcoming, inclusive, skillbuilding and professional development opportunities for research teams and individuals. We have worked extensively with NOAA Fisheries and NASA teams who are creating large complex reports that dynamically combine data, analyses, figures and tables, and output to “organizational-branded” HTML, PDF or Word documents. This is a practical workshop, focused on the full team, databases, analysis and coding, review and project management. We teach the teams skills to effectively manage collaboration across diverse roles and skills, centered with psychological safety and a growth mindset, and make steady progress on retooling their workflows into the reproducible model. Following skill building each morning, teams will work on their own projects each afternoon with help from the instructors.

Specific objectives

The goal of this workshop is to help teams move away from “data_report_v24_final_FINAL.doc” and long email chains, “Re: Re: FWD: data question”, and reduce the loneliness, lost-time, brittleness, and frustration that comes from silo-ed and manual workflows that are inefficient and error-prone and that are not robust to staff turn-over.

Course Level

Participants can come with their team or as an individual and form a team during the workshop. There are no prerequisites to attend, only a desire to make progress on transitioning to a reproducible workflow for some project. Participants with diverse roles and skills are encouraged: just as creating a report requires people who write text and citations, who know the data, who code analyses, who create figures, and who keep the report organized and on time, all these roles are welcome in the workshop. We will learn inclusive approaches to streamline how we bring all these pieces together that will benefit your reports now and in the future. We will be using the RStudio Cloud platform so that participants can work in a fully set-up environment and do not need to install software on their own computers. However we will also provide instructions if participants want to install RStudio, and participants are welcome to use other code-editing platforms that have Quarto plug-ins (e.g. Visual Studio Code, Jupyter). Coders with expertise in R, Python, and Julia are all welcome and will be able to contribute productively on their reports using Quarto.

Target audience

People who want to retool their process of creating reports into a reproducible science framework. Both teams and individuals are welcome at the workshop; there will be time to pitch projects on the first day so individuals can find a shared project if they do not attend with a team. The structure of the workshop is such that teams and individuals at different levels of exposure to “reproducible science” tools will benefit. Those who have participated in the September 2022 ICES workshop on Reproducible Science will learn how to help a full team transition to this type of workflow and create a report framework for a real application. Those who are brand new to these approaches and tools, will learn how to use them and be able to start working using our RStudio Cloud platform on either a visual (like Word) or source code platform.