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The Turing Way | Book Dash - London

The participants

/figures/book_dash_ldn_group.jpg Back row, left to right: Matthew Kemp, Eric Daub, Michael Grayling, Oscar Giles, Lachlan Mason, Kevin Kunzmann, Nadia Soliman. Middle row, left to right: Kirstie Whitaker, Malvika Sharan, Camila Rangel Smith, Danbee Kim, Rosie Higman, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Sarah Gibson, Natalei Thurlby. Front row, left to right: Rachael Ainsworth, Patricia Herterich, Cassandra Gould van Praag, Alexander Morley.

Our report

What did we do?

Our goal for the book dash was to bring together participants enthusiastic about reproducibility to contribute to and improve The Turing Way book during a one day collaborative event. We held a networking event the evening prior to the book dash as a reward and thanks for taking time out to work on the project. We had an icebreaker for participants to get to know each other and lightning talks where we prompted participants to share unique experiences, expertise or promote any projects that they're working on. There was a great diversity of lightning talks which were really fun:

  • Danbee talked about her science fiction graphic novel that combines her neuroscience PhD research with a speculation on how the next 100 years might play out, given our current intellectual, environmental, and socio-political landscape. Titled The First VIRS, which stands for Vigilante Intergalactic Roustabout Scholar. 🎨
  • Sarah brought along some of her cross stitching and discussed how she uses it as a form of self care as she finds it hard to switch off sometimes. She likes that it's methodical work like an ink jet printer, a “glorified form of pixel art”, and that it can get really sassy: “I’ve got 99 problems but a stitch ain’t one”. 💁‍♀️
  • Cassandra told us about her past, present, future. During her PhD, she would swear at her computer because her analysis killed the machine. Colleagues asked her, why aren’t you using High Performance Computing (HPC)? The switch transformed the work she did then and now. She now wants to bring research software engineering (RSE) support to everyone. She's applying for funding for 3 postdocs on a fractional basis to establish an RSE department. She wants to know: what kind of work can this newly developed group do to establish themselves? How are we going to measure the success? 👩‍💻
  • Eric revealed that his motivation for contributing to The Turing Way was because he spent his PhD simulating earthquakes, running around the beach, brewing beer and cooking in Santa Barbara, but he could more easily reproduce the food and beer he made than any of the science he did. 🍻
  • Natalie described the MAPS project: mapping the analytical paths of a crowdsourced data analysis. She wants to know if different types of scientists, researchers and data scientists make different analysis decisions and the goal of this project is to see the variety of different things that can happen and run a data visualisation competition. 🗺️
  • Malvika discussed her experience as a community manager in bioinformatics and biology, and that she tries to trick people into thinking open science is great - you won’t need a great reference from a supervisor because everything will be visible! 👀
  • Nadia pitcher her citizen science project of 150 scientists over 32 countries, a systematic review of cannibis models in animals in pain. There are 10,000+ studies to screen and they are recruiting contributors (who can win an iPad!) to prove that crowd/community/citizen science is actually a feasible thing to do. Her question was, “How to create community to keep people engaged and working on project?” 🐵
  • Alex began his talk with, “I always know that my partner is right!” He took a human centred design course, promoting the idea of how to research what you want to build and create things based on what people need which is now really important to how he works now. It involves watching what people are doing, asking what pain points are. He applies this now in the context of open source software and looking to explore user centred design. 👨‍💻

/figures/book_dash_ldn_dinner.jpg Networking dinner at Megaro hotel.

During the dash, we set out to build upon the Manchester Book Dash experience: we wanted to enhance the first version of The Turing Way book and ensure that contributing to the project is as straightforward as possible. We had a mixture of contributions including curating and editing existing content, expanding existing content and writing entirely new content. Specifically:

figures/book_dash_ldn_art.jpg Art by Matthew Kemp of Scriberia.

What did we learn?

  • 2 first pull requests!! 🔔 🔔
  • Two underscores in file names break Travis/something with the CI and prevent you merging.
  • Learned how to make a pull request, discovered an online resource for hosting large datasets (Dataverse).
  • How to use travis for continuous integration and how to use GitHub better for doing a big collaborative project.
  • Create a book-dash branch that people can merge their PRs into. This could skip the requirement for CI in the short term, and then we could merge that branch to main at the end of the day.
    • So a suggested work flow could be:
      • Fork and make changes
      • Open PR to book-dash branch
      • Review (interate)
      • Approve (no CI needed)
    • At the end of the day, merge the book-dash branch to main if all tests pass.
  • Emphasise style guide in introduction in addition to all the available templates (issue, pull request, chapter).

Feedback

At the end of the event, we asked participants to tell us anonymously something that they liked about the book dash and something they would change in an exercise called Pluses and Deltas which were recorded in this HackMD. The main pluses included that it was a great opportunity to be able to ask questions and learn new things, it was a very friendly and collaborative atmosphere where everyone's contributions were really celebrated, it was inspiring to see how much a team of people working together can achieve in such a short day, and the Scriberia illustrations! Some aspects of the book dash that the participants would change included that the build process for a book on reproducibility is surprisingly difficult, that the Travis-CI lag was a bit annoying since it takes forever to actually merge a pull request, better orgainization of the "how-tos" in advance with a suggestion to add a script that automatically sets up a new chapter and updates all the necessary files, and to have more time!

Impact

Many participants tweeted using #TuringWay!

https://twitter.com/StatalieT/status/1133314251534282753 https://twitter.com/cassgvp/status/1133443808476225536
https://twitter.com/SusannaASansone/status/1133391138856026115 https://twitter.com/Nadia_Soliman_/status/1133407117782781952
https://twitter.com/CamilaRangelS/status/1133412530456539136 https://twitter.com/masonlr_/status/1133491797907464193
https://twitter.com/choldgraf/status/1133511977760727041 https://twitter.com/turinghut23/status/1133671575721529344