Dev session: Brian

[sanjayankur31]

We need to schedule a time/date for the session on Brian

[mstimberg]

Hi. How about doing it in roughly two weeks, either on Tuesday or Wednesday Februrary 9th/10th? I'm flexible time-wise, could be rather in the evening to allow people from the America time zones to join or rather in the morning to be compatible with Asian time zones. Or somewhere in the middle to be annoying-but-doable for both :man_shrugging:

[sanjayankur31]

That sounds good. Yes, assuming users in Europe and the Americas represent a larger fraction of Brian users, evening in Europe would be best. We can record the session too for others to watch later?

[mstimberg]

Ok, to propose some concrete date + time: how about Tuesday February 9th at 17h UTC, i.e. 18h for me in Paris and at reasonable morning times all across the Americas? Late at night for most of Asia, unfortunately. I'd also be happy to have it at Wednesday or Thursday, instead, it doesn't change anything for me. Happy to have it recorded, but apologies for an unpolished and informal presentation in advance :)

[sanjayankur31]

That sounds good. Would you like to do it over BlueJeans? I can request @malinINCF to set this up for us? @malinINCF : would this be the best way to go from the INCF side of things?

@mstimberg : in the meantime, we could spread the word: could you write up a short text for the session that we can publicise? I'll send it out to the OCNS members, and we can perhaps put it on the Brian forums/blog and INCF social media channels too.

[mstimberg]

I don't care much about the platform, it only needs to be possible for me to share my screen. BlueJeans would be perfectly fine from my side. Should the presentation be a complete one-human show, but the way? Maybe it would be nicer to have a "host" + the speaker, so that the host can interrupt if there is, say, a sound problem or if there are questions in the chat, or things like that. I will write a few words about Brian and the dev session soon. I wonder whether we should really send out this specific announcement to all OCNS members, wouldn't that be a bit spammy? I don't think I ever got announcements from OCNS that were not related to really general things (conference, elections for board members, ...). Either way, I think it would be good to make a general announcement for the "dev session" series, maybe with the dates for a number of them already fixed to make clear that this will be a regular event.

[sanjayankur31]

Sure, we can setup a BlueJeans session, and one of us can help emcee the session too.

Yeh, if we do have a few sessions lined up, it'll be nicer to send one announcement for them all. On the other hand, I don't want to make that a blocking requirement. We only have a week to spread the word and the other sessions don't have fixed times/dates and URLs yet. If we can have all of that set up in the next few days we can include them otherwise they'll have to be announced later themselves. I think we'd like an announcement to go out by Thursday at the latest to give prospective attendees a early enough heads-up.

@malinINCF : could you please set up a BlueJeans session for this one for the 9th of Feb at 1700 UTC?

[malinINCF]

I suggest to announce it to the OCSN board, and let them decide if it should be announced more broadly or posted in their social media channels

/Malin

On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 7:10 PM Ankur Sinha notifications@github.com wrote:

Sure, we can setup a BlueJeans session, and one of us can help emcee the session too.

Yeh, if we do have a few sessions lined up, it'll be nicer to send one announcement for them all. On the other hand, I don't want to make that a blocking requirement. We only have a week to spread the word and the other sessions don't have fixed times/dates and URLs yet. If we can have all of that set up in the next few days we can include them otherwise they'll have to be announced later themselves. I think we'd like an announcement to go out by Thursday at the latest to give prospective attendees a early enough heads-up.

@malinINCF https://github.com/malinINCF : could you please set up a BlueJeans session for this one for the 9th of Feb at 1700 UTC?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/issues/3#issuecomment-771854308, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJQZ5LWLZW4F73N7RUZ27C3S5A5XXANCNFSM4WV3JWQA .

-- Malin Sandström, PhD Community Engagement Officer malin.sandstrom@incf.org

International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Karolinska Institutet Nobels väg 15 A SE-171 77 Stockholm Sweden http://www.incf.org

[mstimberg]

Below a few words that could go into an announcement. Feel free to adapt (e.g. replace "I" by my name) and announce it in any way you see fit. I will also send out messages over Brian's own channels.

"The Brian simulator is a free, open-source simulator for spiking neural networks, written in Python. It provides researchers with the means to express any kind of neural model in mathematical notation and takes care of translating these model descriptions into efficient executable code. During this dev session I will first give a quick introduction to the simulator itself and its code generation mechanism. I will then walk through Brian's code structure, our automatic systems for tests and documentation, and demonstrate how we work on its development. The Brian simulator welcome contributions on many levels, hopefully this dev session will give you an idea where to start."

Of course, for twitter etc. something much shorter like "@marcelstimberg will talk about the development of the @briansimulator" will do as well :)

[sanjayankur31]

I suggest to announce it to the OCSN board, and let them decide if it should be announced more broadly or posted in their social media channels /Malin

Hrm, is that necessary? The Board is not meant to be a decision making body for the WGs, and it just adds another task that then adds more delays while we wait for Board members to respond. The Board doesn't decide what projects we undertake either. (I.e.: we provide updates on our actions to the Board, but I don't think we want to have to check with them before we do things.) I can simply e-mail the social media chair to request that this be posted on the social media channels. It's how things work now.

@mstimberg : that sounds great. Do we have a place online where this can be announced? A website: INCF or Brian? If not, should I set up a quick one on GitHub pages for the WG that we can all use to publish WG related updates and announcements?

Another thing: we have confirmed times/dates for Brian and NeuroFedora only, so these are ones we can announce. Given that the Brian session is early next week, I'd like to announce them before the end of the day today. Does that sound OK? I guess I can announce these sessions on the comp-neuro etc. mailing lists as soon as we have links. (I'll set up a zoom link for both sessions now for the announcement, and I can thus host them.)

[mstimberg]

I can simply e-mail the social media chair to request that this be posted on the social media channels. It's how things work now.

I am sure this is perfectly fine. My comment about "spaminess" was only related to your proposal to "send it out to the OCNS members" which I took to be about sending it to list of all members (like election announcements, etc.).

Do we have a place online where this can be announced? A website: INCF or Brian?

I can put announcements on https://briansimulator.org and on https://brian.discourse.group , but of course it would be good to have a general place for the agenda of meetings, dev sessions, etc.

Given that the Brian session is early next week, I'd like to announce them before the end of the day today. Does that sound OK?

Sure, no problem for me. But if you think it is a bit late for an announcement, I'd be happy to shift it to the 10th or 11th (same time).

[sanjayankur31]

I can simply e-mail the social media chair to request that this be posted on the social media channels. It's how things work now.

I am sure this is perfectly fine. My comment about "spaminess" was only related to your proposal to "send it out to the OCNS members" which I took to be about sending it to list of all members (like election announcements, etc.).

Sure. Sounds good. I guess we're just saying we remain quite independent from the OCNS etc. So we request them to give us a signal boost but their communication channels do not act as our primary channels.

Do we have a place online where this can be announced? A website: INCF or Brian?

I can put announcements on https://briansimulator.org and on https://brian.discourse.group , but of course it would be good to have a general place for the agenda of meetings, dev sessions, etc.

Given that the Brian session is early next week, I'd like to announce them before the end of the day today. Does that sound OK?

Sure, no problem for me. But if you think it is a bit late for an announcement, I'd be happy to shift it to the 10th or 11th (same time).

Great. Could we please do the 11th? I'll have a simple GitHub pages based website setup for us over the weekend, and then we can announce whatever sessions we have scheduled by then on Monday too?

[mstimberg]

Great. Could we please do the 11th? I'll have a simple GitHub pages based website setup for us over the weekend, and then we can announce whatever sessions we have scheduled by then on Monday too?

Sure, let's do it on Thursday, 11th then.

[sanjayankur31]

Great. I've set up a zoom meeting and e-mailed it to you. We'll add the info to the announcements. I'll drop a ping here when I have the website up---hopefully on Saturday.

[malinINCF]

I was more thinking of the OCNS board as extra information spreaders rather than barriers, I don't think we need their feedback on this - a message would be more as courtesy informing that their WG/SIG does something :-)

/Malin

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 11:32 AM Ankur Sinha notifications@github.com wrote:

I suggest to announce it to the OCSN board, and let them decide if it should be announced more broadly or posted in their social media channels /Malin

Hrm, is that necessary? The Board is not meant to be a decision making body for the WGs, and it just adds another task that then adds more delays while we wait for Board members to respond. The Board doesn't decide what projects we undertake either. (I.e.: we provide updates on our actions to the Board, but I don't think we want to have to check with them before we do things.) I can simply e-mail the social media chair to request that this be posted on the social media channels. It's how things work now.

@mstimberg https://github.com/mstimberg : that sounds great. Do we have a place online where this can be announced? A website: INCF or Brian? If not, should I set up a quick one on GitHub pages for the WG that we can all use to publish WG related updates and announcements?

Another thing: we have confirmed times/dates for Brian and NeuroFedora only, so these are ones we can announce. Given that the Brian session is early next week, I'd like to announce them before the end of the day today. Does that sound OK? I guess I can announce these sessions on the comp-neuro etc. mailing lists as soon as we have links. (I'll set up a zoom link for both sessions now for the announcement, and I can thus host them.)

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/issues/3#issuecomment-773205190, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJQZ5LSOR4ENQWVAQFTDGNTS5JZUHANCNFSM4WV3JWQA .

-- Malin Sandström, PhD Community Engagement Officer malin.sandstrom@incf.org

International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Karolinska Institutet Nobels väg 15 A SE-171 77 Stockholm Sweden http://www.incf.org

[sanjayankur31]

Sure. I need to give them an update on our meeting already, so I'll include the dev session related info there. I was waiting until we'd merged https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/pull/7 so that we had a link to share with folks. I'll merge that to the new website over the weekend too, and then inform the Board on Monday.

[sanjayankur31]

Post is up. Please make any changes you think necessary (or let me know and I can make them)

https://ocns.github.io/SoftwareWG/2021/02/07/dev-session-marcel-stimberg-brian-simulator.html

[mstimberg]

Thanks, looking great. I'll link to the announcement from our website and the discussion forum.

[sanjayankur31]

Announcements sent out to the various MLs.

[sanjayankur31]

The recordings are currently available here. Code: p+%x5+b3.

They've been passed on to INCF Communications for uploading:

[mstimberg]

I might be doing something wrong but when I access your link it asks me to log in with my zoom account and then shows me "no permission" without ever asking for the code. I'm happy to wait for the final upload, I just hope that INCF is not having the same problem...

[sanjayankur31]

I might be doing something wrong but when I access your link it asks me to log in with my zoom account and then shows me "no permission" without ever asking for the code. I'm happy to wait for the final upload, I just hope that INCF is not having the same problem...

Hrm, that's the link I got in the automated e-mail. I've tinkered with the settings again. Could you see if this works now?

(Zoom seems to give me a new URL each time I check the video but the URL I've given above seems to still work..)

[mstimberg]

Now it works for me (with the link in your earlier comment)!

[sanjayankur31]

Phew! Good to know. The UCL admins have locked the setting for recordings such that they are limited to UCL addresses by default. So we have to manually change that for each recording.

[sanjayankur31]

Video is up here now. Got to add it to our website:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy6Hs5uQ7aQ

[sanjayankur31]

Post updated to include video now: https://ocns.github.io/SoftwareWG/2021/02/07/dev-session-marcel-stimberg-brian-simulator.html

Closing.