[tdwg-tag] Thoughts on TDWG hackathon after NESCent Hackathon
Roger Hyam
rogerhyam at mac.com
Tue Mar 24 15:34:15 CET 2009
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
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Roger Hyam - Project Officer WP4
Pan European Species Infrastructure
+44 75 90 60 80 16
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