Experiment. Paired Community Call + virtual tools hack

[stefaniebutland]

Idea for virtual rOpenHack2021 experiment

Part 1. Community Call on tools in a research domain e.g. hydrology or Antarctic

• Anyone can attend, plus prepares people for Part 2.
• Developers talk about the R and rOpenSci tools and example use cases in that domain; signal what kinds of input they want (documentation, user feedback, work on open issues).
• Make explicit that we value all types of contributions; does not require coding.
• Prior to call, devs label their GitHub issues in prep for Part 2
• maybe have 30 min at end for people to chat with devs about what they might want to work on?

Part 2. 4 weeks after Community Call, a 3-4 hr hack on those tools

• Requires registration and participating in or watching video of Part 1
• Prior to event, participants should comment on issue(s) they'd like to work on and get response / advice / approval of approach from maintainer
• people work in different Zoom rooms where rooms are labelled and people can choose to move between rooms e.g. work on specific tools, help desk, social “take a break” room
• Enable zoom whiteboard. (Or google jam. Miro or mural)
• Every hack room has at least one tool developer
• Everyone leaves having met at least one developer in that domain and one member of rOpenSci team
• End with 5 min presentation by each dev on what things people contributed and what the devs got out of it
• One goal is to have pull requests merged after the event
• Publish summary blog post

Potential Contributions

• Tutorials/vignette
• Documentation
• Features
• Bug fixes
• User feedback
• Write up use cases & post to public forum

Social facilitation

• 2 weeks prior to Part 2, send short questionnaire (copied from past unconfs) to help people mentally prep
• Have 1:1 or 1:3 pre-hack meetings with participants to prepare them to participate & demo platform if needed.

Technology

• GitHub, Zoom, Slack,

Staff roles

• event facilitator should be separate from other roles
• people who monitor zoom chat, slack, mute folks in zoom, create zoom breakout rooms,
• run help desk room
• Run “take a break” social room

Preparation

• Participating packages must have open issues labelled help wanted, documentation, good first issue etc
  • What label should we use to indicate the developer wants user feedback?
• maybe we can host a 1.5-hr rOpenSci label-athon prior to Part 1, open to anyone who wants to set aside time to label issues

Challenges

• Requires time and effort of a group of developers in a research domain
• Timezones!
  • depending on the research domain and its developers, run it at best time for them and consider running a second edition with different developer-leads in a different time slot

Thank you's

Thanks to Rachael Ainsworth and Anthony Arendt for conversations as @steffilazerte and I hatched this plan.

[stefaniebutland]

Potential research domains to feature, likely one per hack:

• Antarctic / Polar
  • see The Antarctic/Southern Ocean rOpenSci community, by Ben Raymond & Michael Sumner
  • lots of scope for combining with other domains like oceanography, marine biology, and ecology because Antarctic science is science that happens to be done in the Antarctic 😄
• hydrology
  • see Research domain specific Community Call - hydrology #8 for details