brenthuisman
commented
1 year ago Thanks for bringing the discussion on the usefulness up, @sanjayankur31. First off: the satellite sessions, are they in addition to the tutorials and workshops I received an invite for yesterday? I was under the impression those will be in person. If they are in addition, given the low turnout of online sessions, I'm tending to foregoing them.
Setting up the infrastructure of an event like previous years sound like too much effort for the outcome to me. Without an idea for getting the attendance up, I wouldn't do that. Ideally something more workshoppy/hackathony would be nice, but my experience is also that these workshop mostly attract new students, of which at least half has no significant programming experience. That means coding is off the table (my own sessions were designed to be interactive, but they never are). Do others experience a similar ratio?
sanjayankur31
mstimberg
appukuttan-shailesh
ree-gupta
cmahapatra97
clinssen
Hi @OCNS/software-wg
This is a follow up from the initial discussion at the January meeting.
The question is: what, if anything, do we do at CNS 2023.
Context
We did a whole week of satellite tutorials at CNS 2022 last year. These were free to register for, and open to everyone. Organising them did take a little bit of work---communicating with tutors, scheduling them, announcing them, setting up all the meetings etc. We had great registration numbers: >250 registrants, but we had low turnout: ~10 per session.
The low turnout could've been for a number of reasons---lack of daily reminders is one, zoom fatigue is another, availability of lots of documentation and video tutorials that users can follow in their own time is another. We sent a short survey to all registrants and got very few responses (a subset of attendees), but those that did respond generally indicated that they'd be happy to pay a small registratin fee.
So, we, as the WG need to decide if we'll do another round of satellite tutorials this year. If we do, the plan is to make a few tweaks to learn from our experience last year:
The larger question is: are online tutorials, and a full week of them covering lots of tools, still relevant/useful to the community? A general feeling does seem to be that because we're all working hard at writing good documentation and tutorials (often video based), users are happier using these resources when they need them (on-demand) rather than sitting through a whole week learning lots of tools that they may or may not need in the short-term future. There are also initiatives like NeuroMatch Academy that are solely focused on training and do a much better job than what we can manage---although, they're not software specific from what I know.
Alternatives
If we think such a week of tutorials is not the way to go, do we want to do something else? If yes, what?
Initial ideas (in no particular order):
So, please comment here with your views. We'd like to make a decision and get started with the necessary organisation ASAP. Please also share this with your labs/colleagues---all input is welcome.