Hackathon Information

This event aims at developing training materials in life sciences to be used in Data Carpentry workshops and other training that is using a similar teaching model. Data Carpentry workshops are aimed at researchers in the life sciences at all career stages. The workshops are designed to teach basic concepts, skills and tools for working more effectively with data. Data Carpentry workshops are an example-driven two-day workshops during which short tutorials alternate with hands-on practical exercises, and participants are encouraged both to help one another, and to try applying what they have learned to their own research problems during and between sessions. See the Data Carpentry website for more info.

Venue

Participation

This hackathon is primarily aimed at the ELIXIR project members. We invite all domain experts who are interested in and may already provide training in data handling; and who are willing to share their materials with a wider community. Participants with experience in running Data and Software Carpentry workshops are particularily encouraged to join. The contribution guidelines provide more information on the work planned for the hackathon.
The local ELIXIR Node Data and Software Coordinators will be contacting the potential participants directly but if you are interested in joining the event please contact Aleksandra Pawlik.

Suggested ideas and Scope of the hackathon

There are many ways in which the participants can contribute to the development of new and the improvement of existing training materials for life sciences in Data Carpentry. We will use GitHub to organize ideas and store the material being developed during the workshop. If you don't already have one, please create a GitHub account. It's free and only takes a few seconds. If you are not familiar with Git, you'll be able to use the wiki interface that GitHub provides.

Improve the current material:
• make sure that current lessons have learning objectives and challenges associated with them so they conform to the Software Carpentry lesson template;
• take advantage of new measurements in mammal dataset to include more plotting;
• refactor current R lesson to differentiate a little more from the content included in Software Carpentry.

Develop new material:
• check this list of proposed tasks / issues and select the ones you are keen to work on.
• translate current lessons to use other datasets; these datasets should be publicly available (if they are going to be included in the Data Carpentry curriculum); it might worth developing a lesson around the Gapminder dataset that is of general interest (for multidisciplinary workshop audiences).
• develop a new R lesson that uses dplyr rather than base R for data manipulation.

• If you have your own datasets which you already use for teaching and you would be keen to share, we will provide detailed guidelines on how to do that during the Hackathon. Good datasets which are rich enough for teaching but not overwhelmingly large and freely available are difficult to get.
• You may also chose to develop training materials for a particular tool used in data manipulation following the Data Carpentry model. We will provide a lesson template to help you structure the material.

Licensing

Data Carpentry instructional material is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License. If you are contributing to Data Carpentry material, you need to agree that your contributions will be released under this license. You can choose to contribute lessons that will not be considered for inclusion in Data Carpentry, and release them under a different license. However, we encourage you to release them under a license that allows free sharing and adapting such as Creative Commons 0 or Creative Commons Attribution license.

Hackathon organization & preparation

By nature, Hackathons are relatively unstructured events. Participants will self-organize in teams centered around shared interests. At the beginning of the first day, participants will be encouraged to present (in 5 minutes or less) their idea(s) for projects they would like to work on. Depending on interests and ideas that overlap or intersect, teams will forms to work on some of these selected ideas. At the beginning of the second day, a representative of each team will report on their project. Teams are fluid. If someone wants to switch projects during the hackathon (e.g., because their expertise is needed for a short period of time) it's perfectly acceptable.

To best prepare for the hackathon, it is a good idea to come with at least an idea of the kind of project you would like to work on. By opening an issue in the Data Carpentry Repository, you will let other people know of your ideas before the meeting. This will facilitate collaborations during the hackathon. Feel free to let people know that you are interested to work with them on a topic they proposed, or offer suggestions to their ideas. Be prepared to provide a 5 minute pitch of your idea during the first day of the hackathon.

Acknowledgements & Support

This workshop is supported by the ELIXIR project.

References and materials

Schedule

Monday	09:00 - 9:30	Welcome and introductions
	09:30 - 10:00	Introduction to the Data Carpentry teaching model. SQL lesson demonstration
	10:30 - 11:00	Material development pitches
	11:00 - 12:00	Selecting projects and setting up. Hacking starts!
	12:00 - 13:00	Lunch break
	13:00 - 15:00	Working on the materials development
	15:00 - 15:30	Coffee break
	15:30 - 16:45	Working on the materials development
	16:45 - 17:00	Wrap-up
Tuesday	09:00 - 09:30	Reporting back from Day 1
	09:30 - 12:00	Working on the materials development
	12:00 - 13:00	Lunch break
	13:00 - 15:00	Working on materials development
	15:00 - 15:30	Coffee break
	15:30 - 16:30	Working on materials development
	16:30 - 17:00	Reporting back and wrap-up

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