Editing Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections (section)

== Afternoon Sessions ==

Projects are done in breakout sessions in a series of three rooms. The general problem was that insisted on teacher per topic and topics were very unequal in their popularity. Next time, we will likely prepare to have multiple teacher for multiple rooms on topics we know will be more popular.

Several changes we hope to make include:

* As we refine this process, we were also interested in thinking of trying to select or refine breakout sessions so that they are more closely tailored to individuals and their interests. Next time, we will consider mining the registration for a list of research questions we might use.
* We want to emphasize bringing people back together more often. In particular, we found that bringing people together back together share work several time during each session and then once in the end to show of achievements or interesting results was effective. We also need to designate a person to a person to go between for each session to remind people to reconvene and to create a program of important or inspiring achievements for presenting to the group at the very end.
* There seemed to be broad interest in examples or projects that are focused on public health and/or epidemiological data.
* We would love to create an afternoon project for Session 3 on basic statistical analysis in Python using scipy, statsmodels, and pandas. At least ten participants would have been enthusiastic to take it.