Personas

[betatim]

What do we imagine attendees to be like? This will help decide where to start at the beginning of the day and where we want to get to at the end of the day.

If you are new to the idea of defining personas check out:

• Mozilla science lab personas guide
• Software carpentry audience

[betatim]

This is what I wrote in the proposal about the target audience.

I would take this as starting point (~one person per category) and see how things go. I am open to changing things but we also need to keep in mind that we should deliver on the proposal :)

[betatim]

Trying to get started on this. The below is my initial idea of who could be a good target audience:

educators, journalists and scientists who attend the workshops in order to learn to use Binder to improve the accessibility, shareability and reusability of their work. People who already have a need for a tool like Binder, but don't yet know it exists. For example journalists who publish their R notebooks alongside their articles, a teacher of a course that relies on software tools that need setting up, an organisation that promotes the use of open data, or a scientist who publishes the data and source-code for their latest paper. Each of these authors already publishes their work but re-use and interaction with this material is limited because readers have to install software tools to use it.

Reading that I think the key ingredient is that it is people who already want to share or are sharing their work and using binder would make that easier or increase the number of readers.

[betatim]

@gedankenstuecke might have some thoughts on getting a first draft of a researcher's persona written.

I think key "requirements" are: we don't want to be persuading them that sharing, or notebooks (R or Jupyter or other) are good things. This workshop is probably more appropriate for people who already believe this. But we can also widen the scope because binder also lets you do things like https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features (runnable examples in your webpage). This might be attractive to someone teaching a course or making itneractive articles.

Another feature I think would be great is that the participants are people who will share and pass on what they learnt with people "at home".

[gedankenstuecke]

How about this one:

Sebastian is a biologist who recently started his PhD. His prior research career has not prepared him to do any software development or coding. But his new, data-intensive research topic means that he needs to learn more about how to code. While he despises Elsevier with passion and is a big fan of Open Access he does not yet know how to translate the principles of open to software. Additionally, as part of his PhD Sebastian needs to teach data analysis at his institution. For this he has been tasked with developing basic teaching materials.

Similarities with real people are pure coincidence 😂

[betatim]

Let's turn it into a PR?!!

[betatim]

Serafin is a journalist at a newspaper who has written a few article where a large part of the research involved digging into datasets and working with designers to get nice figures for the article. For this they needed to scrape websites and do a lot of data cleaning, they used R (or Jupyter) notebooks for this. News is a fast paced business and there were many iterations of the same article. They used git to keep track of the code and notebooks but datasets and final visuals were still shared by email. Serafin is a self taught programmer, learning by doing. Having a simple tool that could help with sharing work internally and making sure that results can be reproduced by others would be very useful to avoid misunderstandings. After the story breaks they might even publish their notebooks so others can check for themselves that the facts hold up.

[matthewfeickert]

Any thoughts on the value of adding a physicist persona (with a HEP angle)? The main difference from the "Sebastian" persona is that this person would probably already have experience with writing their own low level analysis code, but probably has very little experience in making sure that their code is usefully shared.

[betatim]

Sure why not? Maybe we group thematically similar ones into one file? Or edit Sebastian?

I think it would be good to "require" that people already use notebooks (R or Jupyter) and want to share their work (but maybe don't yet know how to do it). Not sure how we encode that in sentences :)

[fthoele]

Another one that's more from the "experienced coder" angle:

Alex is a condensed-matter physicist. During her PhD work, she has accumulated a large collection of python notebooks for her analyses. But when she tried sharing some of these with a collaborator, missing dependencies broke all her code. As a result, she not only wants to improve her own processes, but also how she communicates her research data in general.

Again, similarities to real persons are coincidental but inevitable 🤨