Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2015)
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The Community Data Science Workshops in Fall 2015 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 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?
Several earlier versions of the workshops was run in 2014 and 2015 and the curriculum we used for previous sessions is all online.
Registration
Participants! If you are interested in learning data science, please fill out [FIXME our registration form here]. The deadline to register is Friday April 3. We will let participants know if we have room for them by Monday April 6. Space is limited and will depend on how many mentors we can recruit for the sessions.
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 [FIXME fill out this form] or email makohill@uw.edu. Also, thank you, thank you, thank you!
Social Media
- We use the hashtag #cdsw
About the Organizers
The workshops are being coordinated, organized by Benjamin Mako Hill, Jonathan Morgan, Tommy Guy, Ben Lewis, Dharma Dailey, 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.
The workshops are being supported by the UW Department of Communication and the eScience Institute.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Benjamin Mako Hill at makohill@uw.edu.
