ITCR OPEN Group
Mission
The ITCR OPEN - Operations, Promotion, Education, and Networking - group aims to open up new opportunities for ITCR participants (investigators and teams). We aim to increase the impact of the technologies developed by ITCR participants, improve the effectiveness of our day-to-day work, and support one another. OPEN was originally called the Training and Outreach Working (TOW) group.
Meeting Times!
We meet on the second Thursday of every month from 4-5 PM EST.
Please contact us at the form to the left if you'd like the link to join!
Recordings of meetings are available by request to ITCR participants. Please fill out this form.
Goals of the OPEN working group:
Support development and dissemination of open source software
Enhance awareness and access for technologies developed by ITCR researchers
Facilitate connections among ITCR participants
Provide education for technology developers and users
Initiatives
To achieve the above goals we plan to:
Co-create and demonstrate education and training related to best practices for PIs and trainees on topics such as software development, informatics lab management, tool documentation, and more!
Co-develop tools to help people find ITCR related work.
Provide opportunities for ITCR participants to meet, share their work, share their workflows, and maybe start collaborations!
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Tentative Schedule
June 8th: Discuss the use of generative AI tools for software development
Photo by Dstudio Bcn on Unsplash
Future Meeting Ideas
Workshop on tool use metrics
IDARE (Inclusion, Diversity, Anti-Racism, and Equity) initiative planning
Collaborative course development/workshop on tool use metrics
Workshop on publishing courses with ITCR Training Network (ITN)
Social Media Workshop
Please reach out at the form above if you have other ideas!
Activities!
Past Meetings
May 11th: Discussed ITCR tool resource tables
April 13th: Candace Savonen talked about DataTrail
March 9th: Discussion of Survey and ITCR tool characteristics/usage results
February 9th: We had guest speakers discuss their experience with user acceptance testing for scientific software.
Speakers: Helen Parkinson, Bjoern Peters, and Harry Hochheiser
January 12th: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Documentation and Usability Workshop by Candace Savonen
See slides from this meeting at this link.
May 12th: 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 by request to ITCR participants. Please fill out this form.
See here for meetings from before May 2022.