ANR Lab annual report — optimized collaborative academic writing pipeline
My role
Interaction
Tools
PM and service design muscles
GitHub Actions
Task
To optimize the preparation process of an annual report for a network science lab so that it drives both team engagement and lab brand awareness.
About
Applied Network Research Lab of the HSE University in Moscow asked me to manage the annual report. For this, I decided to optimize the writing workflow to enable both focus on the contents (and not on the formatting) and content repurposing. To do this, I assembled a framework, set up a technical system and conducted seminars where I onboarded team members to use the system. Please, see the 'Process' section for deteailed explanation of design decisions.
Metaphor / Main Idea
The main idea is 'separation of concerns': text, images, academic references and formatting templates are all separated from each other and then compiled according to a DIY template. Another goal is to write content once and use it both as an inner report and a website. I chose Markdown languauge for writing content, Obsidian as a text editor for its ease of use, Zotero for reference management, Pandoc for document compilation and GitHub actions for automating the final document compilation.
Process
Discussion
User flow
Prototype
Seminars
Discussion
After ideating, I came up with a possible solution and pitched it to the team. It was not readily accepted as it required some technical know-how, but eventually we settled on this solution.
Presentation slide with Obsidian and Zotero apps
User flow
After discussion, I built a detailed user flow of the system and shared it with the team. It required me to use the following apps and services: Obsidian, Zotero, Pandoc, GitHub and GitHub Actions. The UX of the process for the user looks like this.
The user flow of the collaborative writing pipeline
Prototype
With a help of a lab colleague, I wrote a Continuous Integration script for GitHub Actions to automatically compile a final PDF of the report any time a team member adds new piece of text to the repository.
Now all the formatting, bibliography insertions and 'References' sections are done automatically, and team members only need to care about authoring the report in plain text.
The CI script for the GitHub Actions
Seminars
I held several seminars for the team members with a walktrhough of the process and helped them to make their first 'commit'.
Now the work on the report is finalised.
Zoom call with the team