Personas

[betatim]

Personas have three parts:

• the person’s general background
• the problem they face
• and how the course will help them

[betatim]

Mehrdad Mapping is a graduate student studying migration in countryA using a large scale house hold survey. He has never taken a programming course, but used SAS in an undergraduate statistics course.

For the last three years, Mehrdad has spent six weeks every autumn travelling to countryA conducting as many survey as he can. He now has a spreadsheet with 5,000 entries, each recording the location and time of a survey, how many people are currently living in a certain household, their relationship to each other, how long they have been living here and several other values. He also has two hundred text files containing 7,000 measurements that his predecessor made in the same regions in the 1980s and 1990s. His task now is to clean up and analyze both sets of measurements so that he can start to correlate changes in migration patterns with changes in climate.

r-and-maps will teach Mehrdad how to standardize, merge, and set up basic analyses for these data sets, and how to produce the figures and tables he needs for his reports with just a few lines of code. In addition, it will show him how to generate and share maps of these data with colleagues.

(liberally taken from Software carpentry)

[betatim]

Hannah Homebase has been working as project coordinator for a large NGO for many years. Many years ago she graduate from university with a Masters degree in Public Health. She is not really a computer person, but has acquired some tremendous VBA scripting skills over the years.

Over the last few years she has been managing staff assignments, budgets, and evaluations for several projects. Most of her data is stored in excel spreadsheets that also contain plots, comments and other formatting. As her data is used for reporting to donors about how the funds are being used she is very careful not to accidentally modify it or lose track of where data came from. She uses her spreadsheets to produce figures and tables for reports. Making these is very labour intensive and sometimes has to be redone because it is not clear how exactly a figure was made.

r-and-maps will teach Hannah how to setup a structure for storing her raw data that keeps it separate from her derived data. In addition it will show her how to create a report containing a mixture of prose and generated figures and tables in a way that she can be sure that she can reproduce them as well as update with a click of a button.

[betatim]

Chris Crisis is a veteran of several emergency response missions. He thrives in situations where thinking on your feet and reacting to changing situations is the norm. He likes exploring new tools and technologies that could help him with his decision making. He is also ruthless in discarding them when they do not perform in real world situations.

On his missions new facts and data arrive all the time. Some arrives by phone, some by email or even word of mouth. He currently keeps tables up to date with the situation in many different locations and summaries of who is doing what where by hand. Situation reports and status updates often require the same plots be made every day. Currently he copy&pastes data into a spreadsheet that contains the charts he is interested in. He reuses the same spreadsheet every day in order to not waste time re-creating the charts each day. The longer a mission continues the more exhausted everyone becomes and mistakes start creeping in. Chris would love to automate more of this and in his downtime can explore options but he does not know how to get started or where to get help.

r-and-maps will teach Chris how to teach himself more about R and how to get help when he gets stuck. In addition, it will teach him how to automate the creation of interactive maps that use the latest OpenStreetMap and overlay the information about a location.