#damienirving

By Damien Irving.

I got a postdoc!! That was the news I shared with our team of Research Community Coordinators (ResComs) last week. I’m super excited about the opportunity to continue my climate research, super stressed about suddenly needing to finish my PhD asap, and also super sad that I’ll be leaving the ResFamily.    

It was back in November 2013 that we ran our first Software Carpentry workshop. At the time I was the only qualified instructor in Australia and would never have dreamed that the local Aus/NZ Software Carpentry community would grow to be the unstoppable juggernaut it is today (check out this map to see what I mean). A large part of that growth is due to the time and money Research Platform Services has invested in ResComs like myself, Scott Ritchie, Isabell Kiral-Kornek and Kerry Halupka. David Flanders and Fiona Tweedie consistently drum into us the importance of community building; the skills and knowledge they’ve passed on have empowered us to take a leading role in growing the local Software Carpentry community. I’ll be forever grateful for that opportunity (it certainly gave me an edge over other postdoc applicants) and hope to stay in touch as a ResAlumni.

@ResPlat Remember this? A great panorama shot from our first ever @swcarpentry workshop. #Flashback #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/EAndyHLTd4

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)

February 2, 2015

We've been running Software Carpentry workshops since November 2013 and are constantly blown away by how popular they are. So when the Software Carpentry Foundation announced that it was looking for institutional Partners and Affiliates, we knew the time was right to take our relationship to the next level. (Was that too much? We're just very excited!)

@ResPlat Remember this? A great panorama shot from our first ever @swcarpentry workshop. #Flashback #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/EAndyHLTd4

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)

February 2, 2015

We are therefore very pleased to announce that we have officially joined the rapidly growling list of institutional Affiliates of the Software Carpentry Foundation.  

As part of the agreement, we will continue to contribute to Software Carpentry in a number of ways. Isabell Kiral-Kornek, Scott Ritchie and Kerry Halupka will continue their great work on the MATLAB, R and web programming lesson materials, Fiona Tweedie and Yuandra Ismiraldi will continue working on new lesson materials for the humanities and social sciences, Damien Irving will continue his role as the unofficial coordinator of Software Carpentry activities across Australia, and we will continue to to run and support workshops both at the University of Melbourne and also across Melbourne and Australia more broadly.

By Damien Irving and David Flanders

The second annual Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint (mozsprint) has just wrapped up (see the global summary here), so we thought we’d recap the action here in Melbourne:

Still going strong here at #mozsprint #Melbourne, some break out groups doing training as well. pic.twitter.com/vHkFagq8X3

— David F. Flanders (@dfflanders)

June 4, 2015

Scott Ritchie and Harriet Dashnow worked on the Software Carpentry teaching materials for Rstat. They received pull requests from all over the globe and even got to chat with the authors of the Gapminder dataset, upon which the materials are based.

Damien Irving and David Flanders worked on the ResBaz cookbook, with help from Nick Jones in Auckland and Bill Mills in Vancouver.

Flanders also wrote this quick blog post on the number of research tools we are starting to see grow in number, over 250+ from our researcher survey.

Isabell Kiral-Kornek and Rob Kerr worked on Isabell’s new D3.js lesson materials. They received pull requests from as far afield as Bangalore and Isabell even found the time to submit her PhD thesis during the sprint!

The reinvigorating effect of #mozsprint in one picture #50ShadesOfGreen @ResPlat @MozillaScience pic.twitter.com/e65U6GBQXX

— Isa Kiko (@Isa_Kiko)

June 12, 2015

Louise van der Werff worked on her new 3DSlicer teaching materials and with the help of Tim Dettrick she managed to get Slicer working on the NeCTAR Research Cloud.

Cobi Smith interviewed everyone in sight about their knowledge of Figshare.

Kerry Halupka, Martin Paulo, Tim Rice and Paul Mignone worked on their MATLAB, NeCTAR Research Cloud, LaTeX and AutoDesk Inventor teaching materials respectively.

The DevOpps team (Linh, Tim, Justin, Jake and Dylan) did some peer2peer training on the DIT4C engine which powers the resbaz.cloud.edu.au platform.

Some of our friends from Monash stopped by - hi Steve Androulakis!

Our friends from research technology MDHS (thanks Fiona Smith!) came along to say hi, as did several other researchers around campus to check out this hackery stuff!

Melbourne team on our last hours of #mozsprint! Balloons, cake, wine - oh my! @dfflanders @Isa_Kiko @cobismith pic.twitter.com/EAiNT3toyR

— Dejan (@heyDejan)

June 5, 2015

By Damien Irving.

This time last year we introduced you to the team of geophysicists behind Underworld, which is a computer model that simulates the movement of continents (i.e. plate tectonics). Every year Masters students in the School of Earth Sciences are required to take a number of one-week courses offered by the Victorian Institute of Earth and Planetary Sciences (VIEPS), so Professor Moresi and his team offered an Underworld VIEPS course for the first time in 2014. Their model has a Python front-end, so we offered to help out by delivering a half-day introduction to Python at the beginning of the week.

These geologists are rocking the @swcarpentry shell lessons! #punintended @ResPlat pic.twitter.com/nGvdyoINfv

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate) May 25, 2015

Upon reviewing the 2014 course, Professor Moresi found that in order to use the Underworld model more effectively, his students would require a stronger grounding in the fundamentals of Python programming. To address this issue, an “Introduction to Python” course was added to the VIEPS schedule for 2015. We helped out by running the first two days of that course as a regular Software Carpentry workshop, and then for the remainder of the week the students applied their newly acquired Software Carpentry skills to typical Earth Sciences problems (e.g. analysing and plotting seismic data). This introductory course was set as a prerequisite for the Underworld VIEPS course, which was held two weeks later.

Recipe: Take @EarthSciMelb Masters students, add @swcarpentry + lessons on #iris & #cartopy, get awesome #dataviz pic.twitter.com/s0r09TQEN1

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate) June 16, 2015

By Damien Irving.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been thinking about how best to provide support and assistance to the global network of ResBazadors (local site hosts) in the lead up to ResBaz 2016. In particular, we know from previous experience that global communities eventually hit the “timezone barrier”. Half the world is asleep at any one time, so as an event grows it quickly becomes impossible to run a meetup that everyone can attend.

We're so excited to announce that @MozillaScience are going to help coordinate #ResBaz2016! http://t.co/qj3bKAuVTe

— Research Bazaar (@ResBaz) May 26, 2015

Organisations like Moziila Science Lab and Software Carpentry often hold the same meeting twice to cater for different timezones, but the audience on some of those calls gets so large that it’s hard to have the detailed one-on-one conversations that we’re looking to cultivate. Taking inspiration from mozsprint, we’ve therefore decided to run a continuous 24-hour call on the last Thursday of every month. Anyone who is interested or involved in organising a ResBaz event can call in to hear the latest news and to ask questions about running their own event. Members of the global coordination team will do shifts on Google Hangout to ensure full coverage of the 24-hour period, and notes from all conversations will be taken in the ResBaz gitter room.

So many great conversations happening in the new @ResBaz @gitchat room! https://t.co/9dMAAaAHuz pic.twitter.com/qVuJtQkf1g

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)

March 16, 2015

This month’s call starts at 8am on Thursday 28 May on the east coast of Australia (i.e. AEST) and will then make it’s way around the world (the Google Hangout link is here). To help you figure out what time that corresponds to in your part of the world, here’s the shift times in UTC (this site is great for making timezone conversions):

Damien Irving (@DrClimate): 22:00 UTC, Wed 27 May - 04:00 UTC Thu 28 May

David Flanders (@dfflanders): 04:00 - 10:00 UTC, Thu 28 May

Leslie Carr (@lescarr): 10:00 - 16:00 UTC, Thu 28 May

Bill Mills (@billdoesphysics): 16:00 - 22:00 UTC, Thu 28 May

By Damien Irving.

At the close of the inaugural Research Bazaar conference back in February, we announced our desire to make it a multi-site event in 2016. By running multiple ResBaz's simultaneously we'll be able to reach more researchers and create more buzz around the event, which will hopefully translate into increased sponsorship opportunities (keeping the event free is a priority) and also increased exposure of the fact that researchers are crying out for quality training in the latest digital research skills.

Over the past few months we've been blown away by the amount of interest we've had from not only universities in Australia and New Zealand, but also throughout North America and Europe. While each individual ResBaz site will have a great deal of autonomy, when we made the announcement we had envisaged that we'd provide some central coordination and assistance to help new sites with planning, logistics and general advice. This would have been achievable for a handful of sites scattered around Australia and New Zealand, however tens of sites from all over the globe is a little beyond our capacity! Enter Mozilla Science Lab. The team from MSL were fantastic supporters of ResBaz 2015 and they've agreed to be the central coordinator for ResBaz 2016. Given their experience running large and globally distributed events (e.g. MozSprint), we're absolutely thrilled that they've jumped on board. Our next community call for the global network of ResBazadors (yep, that's what we're calling the hosts at ResBaz sites) will be later this month, but in the meantime jump on the ResBaz Gitter room to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings and/or contact us at [email protected] if you’d be interested in becoming a ResBazador!

We also have @MozillaScience science at the bazaar! Come chat to @kaythaney & @billdoesphysics #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/cXeuvbRqyg

— Research Bazaar (@ResBaz)

By Damien Irving.

I've been avoiding David Flanders for the past few weeks. For those who've never met Flanders, he is the innovative brains behind the hugely successful Research Bazaar conference (ResBaz) that was held in Melbourne earlier this year. A whole bunch of sites in Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe have already put their hands up to host their own ResBaz conference in 2016 (Feb 1-3), so David asked if I'd help him coordinate the global expansion of the event.

I'm trying to finish my PhD this year, so naturally my first reaction was to run for the hills. But then I got to thinking – if running this event becomes a massive burden on any single person, then we're doing it wrong. This isn't our event. It belongs to the whole international community, which means we can (and should) spread the load amongst that community. This post summarises my thoughts on how we might go about doing that. I'm hoping it will be a conversation starter, with a view to consolidating the plan at the next ResBaz community call (28 May).

General leadership and oversight

From conversations I've had with Flanders, I know that so long as ResBaz (or opportunities for digital research skills training more broadly) is successful, he couldn't care less whether he's the front man or not. Having said that, in these early stages I think it's very important that he does take a central leadership role. As is often the case when Flanders has a good idea or takes on a lead role, he calls on his team of Research Community Coordinators at the University of Melbourne to help make things happen. I'll be the one helping out for ResBaz 2016.

Website and online presence

Obviously one of the most important tools for coordinating a global event is a website. Ours doesn't need all that much content (just a pitch to potential hosts, a list of requirements and advice for hosts, a pretty map showing all the sites, etc), but it does need to look slick and professional so that it impresses potential hosts and sponsors.* The Mozilla Science Lab were fantastic supporters of ResBaz 2015 and are all about helping researchers thrive on the open web, so I'm hoping they'll take the lead on the website. They have a great deal of experience running globally distributed events (e.g. mozsprint), so I’m also hoping they’ll have some great ideas on how we can use the web to link up the ResBaz host sites.

We also have @MozillaScience science at the bazaar! Come chat to @kaythaney & @billdoesphysics #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/cXeuvbRqyg

— Research Bazaar (@ResBaz) February 17, 2015

Survey

An important outcome from ResBaz 2015 was the researcher survey that was included in the registration process. We had over over 450 applicants fill out the survey, which allowed us to capture all sorts of great information about the digital research tools and skills researchers are currently using and seeking to learn. Our sample size will grow enormously with the global 2016 event, so I'm hoping the Software Sustainability Institute will lead the design and implementation of the survey and also the analysis of the data it collects. They have a great deal of expertise in this area and were also strong supporters of ResBaz 2015.

Simon from the Software Sustainability Institute (@SoftwareSaved) - building & using better software #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/iVloio37qk

— Research Bazaar (@ResBaz) February 16, 2015

Quality assurance

It's fair to say that most of the formal classes delivered at the various ResBaz 2016 sites will be taught by Software Carpentry instructors using the Software Carpentry teaching materials (when I say Software Carpentry I also mean their sister organisation Data Carpentry). This was certainly the case at ResBaz 2015 (where we essentially ran three Software Carpentry workshops simultaneously) and it was a key factor in the success of the event, because it ensured that the quality of the classes was high. Software Carpentry instructors undergo formal training before they teach and the materials have undergone years of community development, which means the classes are the state-of-the-art in computing education. Software Carpentry also helped us run an instructor training course in Melbourne during the week prior to ResBaz 2015, so there were lots a newly qualified instructors around to teach and help out.

I haven't asked them yet, but I'm hoping that Software Carpentry might consider running a couple of live training events (and perhaps also an online course for people who can't get to the live trainings) in the lead up to ResBaz 2016. We'll also need Software Carpentry's help in encouraging their global network of workshop organisers to consider running a workshop as part of ResBaz 2016.

For non-Software Carpentry classes, we'll need to have a think about quality assurance. We have global brand to protect, so we want to make sure participants get a great learning experience when they attend ResBaz.

We're here at @swcarpentry instructor training at @unimelb getting ready for #ResBaz! pic.twitter.com/jsH8Uj0EAl

— Research Bazaar (@ResBaz) February 11, 2015

Community

Flanders has put together a group of interested ResBazadors (yep, that's what we're calling ResBaz hosts) who had their first community call a few weeks ago. These calls will become a monthly thing and will be the place for ResBazadors to get the latest information and also to ask questions and receive advice on running their event.

If you've got any comments or feedback on this proposal, please jump on the ResBaz gitter room and let us know!