Community Data Science Workshops (Winter 2020)

The Community Data Science Workshops in Winter 2020 are a series of project-based workshops being held at the University of Washington for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, Twitter, free and open source software, and civic media.

The Winter 2020 workshop series will take place over three Saturdays (plus a short Friday night setup session):

Friday, January 17th (6-9pm)
Saturday, January 18th (9:45-4pm)
Saturday, February 1st (9:45-4pm)
Saturday, February 15th (9:45-4pm)

These workshops are for people with absolutely no previous programming experience and they bring together researchers and academics with participants and leaders in online communities. The workshops are run entirely by volunteers and are entirely free of charge for participants, generously sponsored by the UW Department of Communication and the eScience Institute. Participants from outside UW are encouraged to apply.

Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and graphical visualizations to answer questions like:

Are new contributors in Wikipedia this year sticking around longer or contributing more than people who joined last year?
Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter hashtag?
Are people who join through a Wikipedia outreach event staying involved? How do they compare to people who decide to join the project outside of the event?

We've run these workshops five times in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and the curriculum we used for previous sessions is all online.

Registration

Interested in being a mentor? If you already have experience with Python, please consider helping out at the sessions as a mentor. Being a mentor will involve working with participants and talking them through the challenges they encounter in programming. No special preparation is required. And we'll feed you! Because we want to keep a very high mentor-to-student ratio, recruiting more mentors means we can accept more participants. If you're interested you can fill out this form or email makohill@uw.edu. Also, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Schedule

There will be a mandatory evening setup session 6:00-9:00pm on Friday January 17 and three workshops held from 9:45am-4pm on three Saturdays (January 18 and February 1 and 15). Each Saturday session will involve a period for lecture and technical demonstrations in the morning. This will be followed by a lunch graciously provided by the eScience Institute at UW. The rest of the day will be followed by group work on programming and data science projects supported by more experienced mentors.

All sessions are interactive and involve you programming on your own and on your own laptop. Everybody attending should bring a laptop and a power cord so that they don't run out of battery.

Session 0: Setup and Programming Tutorial (Friday January 17 evening)

Plan to come to the UW campus (at a place TBD) between 6:00 and 9:00pm. It's OK if you come a little late but you'll want to have as much time as you can to finish the setup and self-directed assignments so come as close to 6:30pm as you can. Most people will finish early but some people will definitely need the full 3 hours. It's hard to know in advance where problems will crop up so please come on time even if you are confident.

Time: 6-9pm

Objectives: During this session, mentors will help you:

set up your development environment

learn how to execute Python code from a file and interactively from a Python prompt

learn about printing and using Python as a calculator

Material: Click here for the the setup and tutorial material.

Note: Because we expect to hit the ground running on our first full day, we will meet to help participants get software installed and to work through a self-guided tutorial that will help ensure that everyone has the skills and vocabulary to start programming and learning when we meet the following morning.

Session 1: Introduction to Programming (January 18)

Plan to be on UW campus by 9:45am (location TBD). You will need time to get settled and setup. We will start lecturing promptly at 10am. There will be coffee!

Time: 9:45am-4pm

Schedule

Morning, 10am-12:20 : A 2.5 hour lecture-based introduction to the Python programming language

Lunch, 12:20-1pm : We'll provide lunch (pizza!)

Afternoon, 1pm-3:30pm : Python practice through short projects (see below) on a variety of fun and practical topics:

Wrap-up, 3:30pm-4pm : Wrap-up, next steps, and upcoming opportunities for learning and practicing Python

Objectives: Programming is an essential tool for data science and is useful for solving many other problems. The goal of this session will be to introduce programming in the Python programming language. Each participant will leave having solved a real problem and will have built their first real programming project.

Food

Thanks to generous sponsorship by the eScience Institute at UW, we will provide catered lunches during the Saturday sessions. Although we haven't figured out the menu, the food will all be vegetarian and there will be vegan and gluten free options. If the food we have doesn't doesn't work for you, there is a food court open for lunch in the HUB (the UW student center) that is almost directly next door.

Social Media

We use the hashtag #cdsw

Contact information

If you have any questions about the events, you can contact makohill@uw.edu.

About the Organizers

The workshops are being coordinated, organized by Benjamin Mako Hill, Jonathan Morgan, Dharma Dailey, Mika Matsuzaki, Tommy Guy, Ben Lewis, Emilia Gan, and a long list of other volunteer mentors. The workshops have been designed with lots of help and inspiration from Shauna Gordon-McKeon and Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch and lots of inspiration from the Boston Python Workshop.

These workshops are an all-volunteer effort. Fundamentally, we're doing this because we're programmers and data scientists who work in online communities and we really believe that the skills you'll learn in these sessions are important and empowering tools.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Benjamin Mako Hill at makohill@uw.edu.