Large survey operations Lessons from GALAH

Survey principles Get obsessed Communicate Trust your experts Automate Consolidate Remember your goal

1: Get obsessed To get the details right, there needs to be someone looking after them Within a Working Group, before starting Lots of design/strategy discussion: what’s the best way to do this? Cross-section of expertise/research style Across the team, several times Have people from outside the Working Group check in periodically: why are we doing it that way, could we do this too?

2: Communicate No one* likes mailing lists and phonecons Eat your vegetables: the project will go so much better when it’s well aligned This is especially important if you follow my next point *If you find someone who does, put them in charge of this immediately

3: Trust your experts A large project will need multiple areas of expertise From instrument interface to data analysis A top-down structure can be more stress than it’s worth Especially when people don’t work for you A flatter structure has a central person who knows a little bit of everything and keeps things moving

4: Automate Interactive data work doesn’t scale Processes will be refined over time You will redo everything multiple times Automation will be the default for FunnelWeb Make sure the right information is being collected

5: Consolidate Data transfers are a huge waste of time Of course, keep archives in multiple places But do as much of the processing and analysis as possible in one place Do software in one language as much as possible, use github (or similar) to collaborate Key software isn’t held by one person

6: Stay on target The purpose of the project is to do science Taking data is not science Even if it’s a lot of data Get the data that will answer the questions that motivated the project Give the experts time away from technical things so they can do science

Survey principles Get obsessed Communicate Trust your experts Automate Consolidate Stay on target