[events] Open science coffee ☕

[emmyft]

What is the idea?

Once every month/2 months, 1-hour online meet-up to discuss 1-2 open science idea/concept.

Why

Open science is developing fast and we'd like to keep up, together w/ our community!

Goals

• Provide a face-to-face (virtual/physical) space for the community to come together and learn something new (e.g. from another community member, or from a guest)
• Provide an opportunity for community members to share their work and get feedback from peers

Logistics

Format

• Each coffee has an open science-related topic, from AI to diversity & inclusion. We welcome proposals for topics below!
• Each coffee has 1-2 speakers who will give 10 min talks, followed by 5-10 min Q&A
  • Or, we can choose to have a panel discussion

Tools & platforms

Zoom for video conferencing + registration, gDoc for documentation

Rough organising workflows

• 1 mo ahead of session:
  • announce session (on Events and Twitter) and propose a topic
  • invite speakers (via Slack and personal contacts); speaker suggestions from the community are also welcome!
  • set up Zoom so folks can register
• 2 weeks ahead: confirm speakers, event boost (Twitter, Slack)
• Day before: reminder emails to registrants (via Zoom) and speakers

Measuring success

We will commit to running 3 sessions as a pilot, 2 mo apart, from September 2021.

• We aim to have 15+ attendees per coffee, including 3 new attendees each time.
• By session 3, we hope to get at least 1 speaker to volunteer, or 1 suggestion for a topic to cover in a future session

How can you contribute?

• Suggest topics - you get to suggest speakers and learn more about an open science topic that you're passionate about
• Volunteer to share/speak/host a coffee - email / DM me on Slack; this is a good opportunity to share your work to get peer feedback, and practise presenting!

[emmyft]

Some ideas for topics:

• September (first week, as I'm away 2nd & 3rd weeks): Code review: why is this important? What are the best practices, challenges & opportunities to getting more people to participate in it?

  • Plan to invite someone from the community, someone from community initiatives (e.g. CODECHECK) and someone from maybe a professional RSE team
  • Small "panel" discussion: a few questions from hosts that everyone can answer, followed by audience comments and questions

• October: Diversity, equity & inclusion in research, hosted as part of the diversity week organised by the TUD diversity office.

Other topics suggested:

• narrative CV

More suggestions/comments are welcome! Please use this thread

[emmyft]

Updates: October's topic will be "Diversity & Inclusion in research, technology and design"!

I'm thinking for November, maybe we should do one on open data/open science for climate, maybe in collaboration with the TUD climate institute? KNMI? (other partner suggestions welcome!)

I was inspired by this blog: https://medium.com/the-national-lottery-community-fund/infrastructure-for-community-climate-action-efd290b87a7a

[emmyft]

Pilot of 3 events has now completed! We're very grateful for everyone who participated in these discussions :)

We need to evaluate and reflect on this pilot - see #8 !

[emmyft]

We'd love to collect feedback and suggestions for this series of open science coffees - if you have attended one/more of these coffees, we'd be very grateful if you could spend 5 mins to let us know what went well, and what could be improved.

You can leave your comments here, or send me an email at f [dot] tsang [at] tudelft [dot] nl.

Suggestions for areas to comment on:

• Topics: are they (code review, diversity & inclusion, climate crisis) relevant/interesting? How can we facilitate more community contributions for topics to discuss?
• Format: does the informal panel discussion format work for you? Other suggestions that we should try? Should we try in-person events when the pandemic allows?
• Time, date and frequency: is once a month too much/little? are these advertise enough in advance for people to attend?
• Speakers, facilitators and partners: anyone/other organisations we should involve/invite in future series?

If you could leave your comments by Dec 9, it would help us in our annual evaluation (see #8 ) - but all comments afterwards are appreciated. Thank you very much in advance! 🌹

[emmyft]

We've now summarised some quantitative data, and shared some documentation on how to organise these sessions. This was also featured in our 2021 report! Thank you everyone who contributed 🌷