Tentative Schedule

• May Monthly Meeting - Tools to automate tasks (outside of AI). We will discuss options like GitHub actions for CI/CD and Zapier for administrative tasks. Please join us to discuss other tools, challenges, tips, and tricks related to automating your work. 

• June Monthly Meeting - AI usage for research tasks. Join us to discuss how we can leveridge AI for the more practical everyday tasks to boost our productivity and improve the ease of our work.

Past Meetings

• Feb 7th ITCR Monthly Meeting - Social Media in Science Panel.  We discussed best practices, methods to build community, and tips and tricks to raise awareness about our work.

• Dec 6th at the ITCR Monthly Meeting - Guest speaker Dan Katz talked about software sustainability

• Nov 14th - Discussion about data visualization resource needs and best practices for an upcoming ITN course

• Oct 10th - Discussion about the future of OPEN and survey results

• Sept 18th - Breakfast at the ITCR annual meeting - Andrey Ivanov talked about the inaugural annual ITCR trainee symposium

• August 8th - Sarah Poon talked about resources from the Scientific sofTware Research for User experience, Design, Engagement, and Learning (STRUDEL) project. STRUDEL enables teams to create user-centered software for scientific communities.

• July 11th - Dan Katz spoke about the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) https://www.researchsoft.org/ and the United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) https://us-rse.org/.

• June 13th - Introduction to an inclusivity language tool developed by the General Services Administration (GSA). Followed by a discussion of methods for managing software releases, identifying what features to develop, and tracking and triaging bugs, using  Ch 7 onward of "Program Management for Open Source Projects" - By Ben Cotton as a scaffold for discussion. 

• May 9th - Discussion of methods for open software project and team management. Used Ch 5-6 of "Program Management for Open Source Projects" - By Ben Cotton as a scaffold to discuss methods for developing and implementing processes and strategies for successful meetings. 

• April 11th - Discussion of strategies for communication and relationship based on Ch 3-5 of "Program Management for Open Source Projects" - By Ben Cotton. 

• March 14th - Discussion of finding balance and making decisions based on tradeoffs for opensource projects using (Ch 1-2) of "Program Management for Open Source Projects" - By Ben Cotton as a scaffold. 

• February 8th -  Promoting more Inclusive language in Tech

• January 11th -  Discussion and introduction of course about AI possibilities by guest speaker Ava Hoffman

• December 14th: Introduction of metricminer and discussion of metric needs for scientific software - Speaker Candace Savonen

• November 9th: Generative AI and ITCR projects part 2 - Guest Speaker Han Liang

• October 12th: Generative AI and ITCR projects - Guest Speakers Giacomo Marino and Stephanie Olayia from Avi Ma’ayan's group

• September 14th: No meeting - to allow people to travel back from the ITCR annual meeting

• September 13th OPEN Breakfast at the ITCR Annual Meeting 

• August 10th: Speakers Dan Knight and Greg Caporaso will talk about methods they used to interact with their user communities online including forums and web applications. 

• July 13th, 2023: No meeting - taking a break for the summer!

• June 8th, 2023: Discussed the use of generative AI tools for software development based on the ITN-related course

• May 11th, 2023: Discussed ITCR tool resource tables

• April 13th, 2023: Candace Savonen talked about DataTrail

• March 9th, 2023: Discussion of Survey and ITCR  tool characteristics/usage results

• February 9th, 2023: We had guest speakers discuss their experience with user acceptance testing for scientific software.

Speakers: Helen Parkinson, Bjoern Peters, and Harry Hochheiser

• January 12th, 2023: We had an introduction to using LaTeX and Overleaf for writing and collaborating on scientific manuscripts. We also discussed how we would use this to continue refining the draft of the software metrics manuscript. See this link for the training materials that were discussed. This will eventually become one of the ITN courses.

• December 8th, 2022: Checked in on the progress of the manuscript and our analysis of a set of tools and the infrastructure that each has to allow for various metrics analyses.  We will also had speakers talk about their experience being involved in ITCR activities at conferences.  This was followed by a discussion of potential ITCR and ITN outreach and training opportunities that we could do at conferences and other venues.  We focused on potentially planning workshops that ITCR participants could give at conferences to showcase their software. We discussed how that could potentially be supported by the ITN. 

• November 10th, 2022: We had a quest speaker (Vincent Carey) present about a training program: Training and Outreach for Cancer Data Science: Engaging Young Empowered Scientists with Bioconductor and Galaxy https://vjcitn.github.io/YESCDS/

• October 13th, 2022: We reviewed and discussed the content developed for the manuscript since the meeting in September.  We also discussed the plan for moving forward with the development of the manuscript and the survey for ITCR participants about software impact /engagement analysis. 

• September 8th, 2022: We reviewed the content developed for the manuscript since the meeting in August.  We will also discussed a survey draft for ITCR participants about usage metrics analysis at the ITCR annual meeting. 

• August 11th, 2022: Discussion about the outline and writing plan for a manuscript about analyzing software user metrics. Contributors with expertise who help us write will be eligible to receive authorship! Click below on the pink button if you would like to contribute but couldn't attend (and didn't yet reach out to us otherwise).  We hope to have some content written by contributors by the next meeting (could range from a sentence to a couple of paragraphs).

• July 14th, 2022: Discussion about the utility of analyzing tool user metrics and possible course and/or manuscript co-development 

Speakers: Mary Goldman (Xena), Martin Morgan (formally analyzed metrics for  Bioconductor), Michael Reich (GenePattern, IGV, and GSEA)!

• June 9th, 2022: Documentation and Usability Workshop by Candace Savonen 

See slides from this meeting at this link.

• May 12th, 2022: Discussion of OPEN/TOW future and Introduction to the ITCR training Network 

See slides from this meeting at this link.

Recordings of meetings are available on the agenda - please request access by filling out the form above to join the OPEN group.

See here for meetings from before May 2022.