ResearchOps Toolbox

Introduction

Check it out at toolbox.researchops.community

This is a community-based project focused on creating and maintaining a resource for researchers and research operations specialists that will empower people to find out not only what tools are being used, but also in which industry, by what size of teams, and where in the world.

Our hope is that this will help researchers and ReOps specialists with tool audits, comparative analyses, and the evaluation and justification of specific research tools. Ultimately, we want to make the tool evaluation and selection process easier and save hundreds of hours for researchers, ReOps specialists, and those who support research.

This is made by researchers & ReOps-ers, for researchers & ReOps-ers. This is a grassroots volunteer effort with no product sponsorship or affiliation.

Feedback and getting involved

We are continuously collecting data and improving the toolbox.

You can visit our public roadmap and github project

If you have any feedback or would like to get involved, you can submit it through our contact form or reach out to us at tools.census@researchops.community

What we have

A snappy front-end framework SvelteKit
Deployment on Cloudflare
Airtable database
Figma mockups and graphics

Quick start

Once you've installed dependencies with npm install (or pnpm install or yarn), start a development server:

npm run dev

# or start the server and open the app in a new browser tab
npm run dev -- --open

To create and run a local Node version of your app:

npm run start

Contributing

Make a pull request.

Editing Content

Descriptions and other editorial content in the app is stored in Markdown. The following instrucionts will allow anyone to edit content on the Github website and then submit a pull request for a project team member to approve.

Instructions:

Navigate to https://github.com/researchops/toolbox/tree/dev/src/routes (ensure you are in the dev branch).
Navigate to the page you want to edit (like design-collaboration.svx)
Edit file by clicking the pencil icon
Use markdown syntax to make changes (guidelines found on markdownguide.org)
Scroll down to Commit Changes and select the Create a new branch option.
Name the new branch and click propose change.
Click Create pull request
Add a reviewer in the conversation tab or notify a collaborator in chat.
Optionally click the Checks tab to view a branch deploy of your changes.
Delete the branch.
Wait till a scheduled release to publish the changes to production or request an off cycle release.

How it works

[ Airtable ] -> [ Local build ] -> [ Github ] -> [ Cloudflare Pages ]

Data is synced manually by running npm run build:data. This does 2 things:

Run a script that pull data from airtable & prepare the data
Copy the data to the /static dir to make it available for the site

| ⚠️ On Airtable, data is synced by field names and not field IDs.

Once deployed on Cloudflare (CF), Svelte Kit creates an API endpoint in a CF worker. During build and live, each static markdown page will query this endpoint with a list of 'config' that match a chart on that page. For example, a static markdown page could contains the following charts: user-mapping, user-interviews.

In order to fetch these data, we'd need to pass the key user-mapping & user-interviews to the create_loader function on top the page.

researchops/toolbox