Doathons bring together diverse participants to get things done — openly, collaboratively and quickly. The event centers around participants (no monologues!) and focused attention to doable projects, where collaboration, discovery and preservation are made easy.
The term is inspired by hackathons — events focused on coding — but the activities can and do extend well beyond coding, e.g. to include graphic design storytelling, policy or curriculum development, outreach activities, you name it.
To get an idea of what this might mean in practice, take a look at a previous doathon and see what was done there.
The event is for people interested in open data — providers, aggregators or users of open data, data visualizers, data journalists, user experience designers, educators or anyone working towards making data open or reusing open data.
It is organized by the Data Science Institute (DSI) at the University of Virginia as a satellite event to the OpenCon doathon held on 13 November 2017 in Berlin, which was part of OpenCon 2017 and gave rise to a range of issues that are still being worked on.
18-19 November 2017 (Saturday & Sunday; 9am-4:30pm on both days)
If things go well this time, check out what's next.
At OpenGrounds (in The Corner), 1400 University Ave, Charlottesville, VA 22903.
The theme of this event will be open data, i.e. data that have been shared with no or minimal restrictions on reuse.
On day 1, the focus will be more on open research data, on day 2 on open data from the city of Charlottesville, Albemarle county and the state of Virginia. For details, go to data.md.
We are collecting ideas in this repository's issue tracker. Please check whether any of the projects in there are of interest to you already, or consider adding your own by opening a new issue. You will be able to submit new ideas until and throughout the event.
The ideas listed there will form the basis of the idea pitches, by which we try to match people with ideas. Here is an example of a pitch that was made at an earlier doathon, and here is an example of a remote pitch for the same event. Once the groups are formed, they start working on the ideas they chose, at their own pace but with the option to ask around the room (or the Web) for help if they get stuck, and to have lunch on site.
About 2-3 times during the day, work will be briefly interrupted to document what has been done. See how this looked at prior events. The goal here is to make visible progress, not necessarily to deliver a polished final product. We plan to organize more of those doathons in Charlottesville in the future, and since we are working in the open, we can continue work others have started, or vice versa.
We recommend that you use at least two of these
The details are still pretty much in flux, since they depend on you, but the general structure can be summarized in the following table.
| Day 1 | Day 2 |
|---|---|
| 9-10am: Arrival, breakfast & introductions | 9-10am: Arrival & breakfast & introductions |
| 10-10:15am: Opening | 10-10:05am: Opening |
| 10:15-11am: idea pitches (2 min each) | 10:05-10:30am: idea pitches (2 min each) |
| 11am-4pm: Working | 11am-4pm: Working |
| 12-1pm: Lunch provided | 12-1pm: Lunch provided |
| 4-4:30pm: Wrap up for day 1 | 4-4:30pm: Wrap up |
The slots labeled "Working" will have optional lightning talks (2 min each) and occasional documentation sprints (about 5 min every other hour).
We are seeing this doathon as a prototype for a series of similar events to be held in or around Charlottesville on a variety of topics, and to follow up on projects from previous ones. If you are interested in helping organize a future one, please get in touch.
Daniel Mietchen, daniel[dot]mietchen[at]virginia[dot]edu or @EvoMRI on Twitter or Daniel-Mietchen on GitHub.