Hi Everyone,
I had the pleasure of attending the NESCent Hackathon on Evolutionary Database Interoperability the week before last
https://www.nescent.org/wg_evoinfo/Database_Interop_Hackathon
and I said before hand that I would report back on my thoughts for holding similar hackathons within TDWG.
This is a very quick summary of those thoughts. My overriding impression was that the success of the event was based on the preparation that went in before hand.
* Firstly the NESCent team did a really good job of organising the hackathon and dedicated considerable resources to it. * The hackathon was focussed on three technologies; CDAO, NeXML and PhyloWS. * There was a pre-meeting for the core team and there were two conference calls which most of the participants were involved in. * The wiki was used to work up some test cases and various documentation before the hackathon started. * There were mailing list discussions.
Personally I had a great time and learned a great deal. I had the impression that others had a similar experience. I think we pushed things forward a great deal and came up with some code that may be useful.
If we were to do a similar TDWG hackathon I think it would be a good idea to focus down on one or two technologies. Perhaps identify a single challenge that faces us - an obstacle that needs to be crossed. We would have to find resources to pay not only for getting everyone in the same room with the right level of IT support but also to pay for some one to administer the run up and wind down to the whole thing. These are critical. Without them I believe we'd be wasting our time.
Getting the balance right between letting people follow their own ideas and pushing everyone in the same direction is also very important. The open question of "How do you integrate what you are working on at the moment with the subject of the hackathon?" might be a good place to start.
I think the TDWG developer community could really benefit from a similar hackathon provided it was well funded and run.
All the best,
Roger
----------------------------------------------------- Roger Hyam - Project Officer WP4 Pan European Species Infrastructure +44 75 90 60 80 16 -----------------------------------------------------