Our group aims to support the Hutch’s data community and beyond. Our core values guide how we work together and how we contribute. They have grown out of our experience in open science and our belief that people and teams do their best work when they feel valued, trusted, supported, and connected.

Our work brings together people with different expertise, perspectives, and responsibilities, within our group and across Fred Hutch. None of us can do this alone. By combining what we know with what our collaborators know, we can build data, technology, and processes that contribute to the Hutch’s mission of compassionate care and advanced therapeutics for people with cancer and related diseases.

As with everything we do, we make our core values open so people can understand how we approach our contribution and responsibility to the Fred Hutch data community.

How we treat each other

Be kind. Kindness is key. We strive to offer each other grace, empathy, and respect, even in tough conversations or while solving hard problems. That means communicating respectfully, being patient, appreciating effort, and contributing to psychological safety. Kindness does not mean avoiding disagreement or accountability. It means approaching both with respect and a shared commitment to doing good work together.

We trust each other’s expertise. We hire and collaborate with people because we value what they know and the perspectives they bring. We trust people to exercise good judgment within their areas of responsibility, while recognizing that our work is deeply interconnected. Good decisions often require bringing in people with different expertise or responsibilities. Knowing when to act, when to ask, and when to bring others in is part of working well together. Trust also means being clear about commitments, following through, and communicating early when something changes.

We take care of people. We want people in our data community to have opportunities to learn, grow, contribute meaningfully, and do work they are proud of. That means sharing knowledge, helping people develop new skills, connecting people with useful expertise, and making it easier to participate and contribute. We also believe good work should be sustainable. We try to build relationships, resources, and ways of working that recognize people have different responsibilities, constraints, experiences, and goals.

Give each other permission to be human. Everyone has a day job, and everyone has a life outside of work. People bring different pressures, responsibilities, constraints, and priorities, both at work and at home. Enabling one another means recognizing that and designing our collaboration accordingly. We try to be thoughtful about what we ask of others, clear about what is truly urgent, flexible about how people contribute, and respectful of what they are balancing. Good collaboration should make it easier for people to do their work well, not simply add more work.

How we work

When we treat each other well, value different expertise, and give people the support they need to do impactful work, we can accomplish a lot together.

Build things that will help people. We are part of a much larger community of scientists, clinicians, research staff, technologists, administrators, and many others working toward the Hutch’s mission. Our goal is not simply to build excellent data tooling. It is to make that broader community more capable and ultimately support better research, more compassionate care, and better ways to prevent and treat cancer. Sometimes that means helping people directly through training, community events, documentation, or Data House Calls. Sometimes it means building resources, software, infrastructure, data products, or processes that help others do their work.

Make an Ugly First Draft. One of the bravest things we can do is put an unfinished idea into the world early enough for other people to help make it better. That might be a rough analysis, a prototype, a new way of using data, a scientific hypothesis, or an idea that could eventually contribute to a new way to prevent or treat cancer.

An ugly first draft is not the absence of rigor. It is an invitation to collaborate. Sharing work before it feels finished gives other people the chance to question it, strengthen it, connect it to something we had not considered, or help it become something entirely different. Impact rarely comes from one person perfecting an idea alone. It comes from people bringing different expertise to something that is still taking shape. The sooner we share what could be, the sooner we can begin building it together.

Seek feedback and keep improving. Good work gets better when other people can see it, question it, and contribute to it. We should expect our ideas and work products to change as we learn from one another. Feedback is not something that happens only at the end. It is part of the work. Share early, listen carefully, test assumptions, incorporate what you learn, and keep iterating. We value continuous improvement over waiting for a perfect answer. The goal is not to get everything right the first time. It is to keep making the work better together.

Build the collective knowledgebase. If you learned something, made a decision, solved a problem, or figured out how something works, leave a record that someone else can use. Knowledge is more valuable when it can live beyond the conversation, meeting, project, or person where it started.

Open documentation is one of the ways we enable each other every day and enable scientific discovery itself. It helps people understand why decisions were made, reuse what others have learned, avoid solving the same problems repeatedly, and contribute even when they were not in the room. Write things down, make them findable, and leave something the next person can build on.