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Project Guidelines

geohackweek edited this page Aug 14, 2017 · 7 revisions

Purpose of the projects:

During Geohackweek we will be facilitating open hacking sessions most of the afternoons. The purpose of these sessions is for you to gain hands-on experience in working together on a well-defined problem related to geospatial sciences.

What is hacking?

Hacking is a session of focused, highly collaborative computer programming, in which we create conditions for rapid absorption of new ideas and methods. Visit our hacking central page for more specific information on this approach.

Why is this important?

Increasingly, research and software development is being conducted across groups of people with diverse skills and backgrounds. We believe this collaborative work leads to more innovative solutions to complex problems. At geohack week, our goal is to explore with you some of the skills needed to navigate technical and social challenges of working in these kinds of collaborative settings.

How will the projects be conducted?

  • on day 1 we will facilitate the sharing of ideas and formation of people into small teams (2-5 people)
  • each team will identify:
    • a project lead, likely the person who pitched the idea, who has knowledge of the datasets and the specific problem to be explored
    • a data science lead from the pool of geohack instructors who has expertise in the data tools and methods
  • once formed, each team will be guided through exercises to help narrow in on a set of tasks that are doable within the 5 days. A brief project outline will be posted to GitHub, following the "Project Guidelines" below.
  • Each morning will start with a daily stand-up meeting to check-in on progress and challenges
  • On day 3 we will have a mid-week project check-in
  • On day 5 each team will present their work in a series of lightning talks.

What can I do to prepare in advance?

  • if you have a project idea already brewing, we encourage you to share that with the team on our general Slack channel. We can add additional channels as the project ideas develop.
  • feel free to explore various projects and initiate conversations. The goal is to gather as much information as you can to inform your decision about which team to join when we meet in person.
  • contact a geohack organizer if you would like assistance in assessing whether a project is well-scoped, or if you need help with a particular dataset.

Project guidelines

Each project requires a brief project summary in the readme.md of each GitHub project folder. Below is a template for the project summary. You can visit the project folder on the geohack GitHub page to see existing examples.

Project Title

Brief title describing the proposed work.

Collaborators on this project

List all participants on the project. Choose one team member to act as project lead, and identify one geohack organizer as the data science lead.

The problem

What geospatial problem are you going to explore? Provide a few sentences. If this is a technical exploration of software or data science methods, explain why this work is important in a broader context.

Application Example

List one specific application of this work.

Sample data

If you already have some data to explore, briefly describe it here (size, format, how to access).

Specific Questions

List the specific tasks you want to accomplish or research questions you want to answer.

Existing methods

How would you or others traditionally try to address this problem?

Proposed methods/tools

Building from what you learn at geohackweek, what new approaches would you like to try to implement?

Background reading

Optional: links to manuscripts or technical documents for more in-depth analysis.