Feedback

[emitanaka]

First of all, I acknowledge a lot of effort was put in place for this and thank @adamhsparks for inviting me for feedback on this. What I write below I hope can be taken as a constructive criticism and I hope sheds another perspective.

I echo similar comments with @John-Maclean (aka Jack) in that I don't really wish to adopt this. My reasons are as follows:

• I already have my own Quarto template and workflow, therefore I don't want to spend time accommodating to another workflow with no significant extra benefit.
• I note Scott's comment about wanting to have a professional identity but the branding is plastered with GRDC, UQ, Curtin and Adelaide logos (for the pdf report, this seems to be for footnotes on every page). This is excessive. Also, not everyone belongs to these institutes and this promotes a rather hierarchical structure in branding where other institutions seem secondary at best. Why not just make it an acknowledgement? ARC funding does not require ARC logo to be front-and-center on papers. The front-and-center piece is the author. Intellectual contributions are quite valuable, but this style choice seems to suggest that the important elements are the funders and not the authors.
• I want to have the ability to have my own individual expression and identity. I don't wish to conform to a standardised style unless there is a good justification behind it. I think it is important to allow for creative expression, although I acknowledge some work require more standardisation.

I don't think the tangible benefits for the user were articulated enough in the talk and AFAIK, there was no wide community consultation (at least I'm aware of) in the development. I realise this is not the intention and I am aware of the benefits of the reproducible framework with Quarto (or Rmd), but I think it's important to acknowledge that academics or analysts are busy people and you are actually asking a lot by insisting people use this, especially when they had no say to the development.

I think it's more important to give high level reasons. Like why not create a style guide with justifications for the elements? Expected font sizes for readibility, color blind friendly palettes, what information should be on the cover sheet for standardisation, appropriate margins for printing etc and while authors have to conform to the style (as it is the case for ARC applications), they are free to do what they wish otherwise. Then the templates already conform to the expected style guide, so it makes the users life easier by using them. This reasoning behind the choices in templates is important to articulate in my opinion.

This is not to say this work is not excellent! I for one think it is a good direction to get people to adopt a reproducible framework and standardise some aspects of reporting. Just that the development didn't seem community-driven and didn't articulate the benefit for the community well enough.

More important than perhaps the template is I think how you encourage the naming convention or folder structure of projects, but this is another matter.