Creating a Workspace

To start a research project in the All of Us Researcher Workbench, you want to create a workspace.

Creating a workspace is easy, and you are required to create a new, separate workspace for each of your research projects.

To create a workspace

1. Log in to the Researcher Workbench.
2.  Select “+New Workspace” on the Researcher Workbench 2.0 landing page or under “Workspaces” tab.
    

3. Complete information about the workspace via the three dialogue pages noted here. Name your workspace to best represent your research project. Additionally you will be prompted to select a pod. The workspace name and pod are required; other prompts may either be optional or prefilled. 

   Billing pods are created and linked to a Google Cloud Platform billing account. Consider a billing pod as the GCP billing account. When setting up your workspace, use the following as an example: 

• Pod: Example using All of Us initial credits - “user-pod-<username>-XXXX”
  • If your username is moirad@researchallofus.org your All of Us initial credit billing pod would be “user-pod-moirad-XXXX” with XXX being a random string. 
  • If you would like to use your own GCP billing account, see instructions here to set up your billing pod in the new Researcher Workbench. 
    • Note: Once you select a billing pod for the workspace, it cannot be changed. You will be required to duplicate the workspace to add a new billing pod.
• Group Policy: “No, don’t apply policy”
  • Note: Once you add an All of Us data collection, a group policy will be enforced. Learn more about the data collection policies here. 

• Region: us-central1 (Iowa) or any GCP region you would like to access

  The summary of the workspace is used to provide an overview description.
  Note: This information is publicly displayed on the Research Project Directory on the Research Hub, so be mindful when naming your workspace. To learn more about writing a meaningful workspace description see our support article “Writing Your Workspace Description.”
  
  
   

4. Click the “Create workspace” button on the last screen. It may take several minutes for the workspace to create.
5. Once your workspace is created, you will then need to add your All of Us Data Collection in the Resource tab in order to access the All of Us dataset. 

6. After you create a workspace, you can add either the “All of Us Registered Tier” or “All of Us Controlled Tier” to your workspace via the Resources tab of your workspace. In the workspace, navigate to the Resource tab. Select Data from Catalog. 

   

7. Select the Data Collection of your choice. There will be two options: “All of Us Registered Tier” and “All of Us Controlled Tier.

   

8. Select appropriate resources in the Data Collection. For example All of Us Registered Tier or All of Us Controlled Tier. A full list of CDR versions are noted in the Data Dictionary here. 

   

9. Review the Data Collection policies, complete the “Researcher Use Statement Questions,” and select “I'm sure. I understand that all policies and terms above will be permanently applied to this workspace.”

   

10. You will have the option to select where in your resources you want this data collection to live. We recommend using your workspace folder path.
11. Select “Add to your workspace.”

After completing the initial setup of your workspace, you will write your workspace description, which is publicly displayed on the Research Project Directory on the Research Hub.

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