Community BOF notes

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
3 min read

 

 

Note that this BOF overlaps with training and documentation issues being discussed elsewhere.

There is a growing commitment to dev congress meeting of one sort or another - there should be a conscious effort to meet, greet and involve New and Prospective Adopters (NPAs) there before moving on to have groups work on discrete problems.

  • Regional code days would attract new people in (limited travel/expense)
  • Hydra committers to just become "Hydra tech" so more people can/will join the weekly call.
  • Call will become weekly at 11:30 Eastern on Wednesdays and include standing items.  May move to two calls (eg US and Europe) to overcome time zone problem; would need some people in common to ensure information flow to and fro. 

Tempting to seek out friends at regional events which makes inclusivity an issue.  Always ensure there are two spare seats at your table for "new" friends.

Might encourage internships or mentorships - probably regional basis - devs go to each others' institutions for a time either to see what is going on elsewhere or to work on shared problems.

Are we doing enough for NPAs outside meetings?

  • arrange more visits?
  • program of Google Hangouts (eg)?
  • known people available to answer questions

There is a need for more narrative description of what Hydra is and does from the 10,000ft level.  Reading docs on github is not a good on-ramp for devs or managers!

  • survey of pain points to inform documentation needs?
  • get people to write things up locally - blog?
  • Steven Ng is going to produce a summary blog of all the Hydra developments he is told about or can track down
  • Documentation is necessarily ephemeral!
  • (Better) documentation won't happen unless someone is funded to produce it
  • Maybe we could commission brief screencasts on a regular basis (cf RailsCast)
  • Need something around metadata modelling (there is a group already surveying this landscape)
  • Institutions should make and share at least one poster a year describing their work (this could be the Connect poster)

How do we get beyond the existing community

  • presence at non-Hydra events
  • identified ambassadors at events (Jeremy says he will be a tech ambassador for ever!)
  • encourage key presenters to add their slide packs to the wiki so that others can take from them for use elsewhere

Hydra events

  • Assigned meet and greet people for NPAs (maybe paired beforehand)
  • Urge people to mix/be inclusive at dinners etc
  • Sign-up dinners on other nights?
  • More occasions like posters where people can mix and discuss
    • need to do a better job of making sure poster presenters also get to see others' work even if this means leaving posters unattended for a time
    • don't go overboard on conference tracks.  Mixing devs and managers is good!  More chances for cross-communication
  • Could we fund scholarships to bring people in?
  • Can we write travel money to bring groups together (eg like the ORCID folks did)

Documentation and training should not be second class citizens in the Hydra community now that Hydra is so big and complex to understand.  Needs a step-change in attitude.

Need a "Dive into Hydra 1.2" that goes beyond the basic lesson and deals with other content types as a contrast

There will be ebb and flow in commitment to Hydra depending on workload - and that's OK.

We should look at working with Library Schools (Bess is doing already)

Hydra for MOOCs might be an interesting solution bundle.

Food arrived - so meeting adjourned!