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The Community Data Science Workshops in November 2014 are a series of project-based workshops being held at the University of Washington for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, Twitter, free and open source software, and civic media.

The workshops are for people with absolutely no previous programming experience and they bring together researchers and academics with participants and leaders in online communities.  The workshops are run entirely by volunteers and are entirely free of charge for participants, generously sponsored by the UW Department of Communication and the eScience Institute. Participants from outside UW are encouraged to apply.

There will be a mandatory evening setup session 6:30-9:30pm on Friday November 7 and three workshops held from 9am-4pm on three Saturdays in November (November 8, 15, and 22). Each Saturday session will involve a period for lecture and technical demonstrations in the morning. This will be followed by a lunch graciously provided by the eSciences Institute at UW.  The rest of the day will be followed by group work on programming and data science projects supported by more experienced mentors.

Setup and Programming Tutorial (November 7 evening) — Because we expect to hit the ground running on our first full day, we will meet to help participants get software installed and to work through a self-guided tutorial that will help ensure that everyone has the skills and vocabulary to start programming and learning when we meet the following morning.

Introduction to Programming (and November 8) — Programming is an essential tool for data science and is useful for solving many other problems. The goal of this session will be to introduce programming in the Python programming language. Each participant will leave having solved a real problem and will have built their first real programming project.

Importing Data from Wikipedia and Twitter APIs (November 15)  — An important step in doing data science is collecting data. The goal of this session will be to teach participants how to get data from the public application programming interfaces (“APIs”) common to many social media and online communities. Although we will use the APIs provided by Wikipedia and Twitter in the session, the principles and techniques are common to many other online communities.

Data Analysis and Visualization (November 22) — The goal of data science is to use data to answer questions. In our final session, we will use the Python skills we learned in the first session and the datasets we’ve created in the second to ask and answer common questions about the activity and health of online communities. We will focus on learning how to generate visualizations, create summary statistics, and test hypotheses.

Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and graphical visualizations to answer questions like:

• Are new contributors in Wikipedia this year sticking around longer or contributing more than people who joined last year?
• Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter hashtag?
• Are people who join through a Wikipedia outreach event staying involved? How do they compare to people who decide to join the project outside of the event?

An earlier version of the workshops was run between April and May 2014 and the curriculum we used in the Spring is available online.

Sign up and Participate!

Participants! If you are interested in learning data science, please fill out our registration form here. The deadline to register is Thursday October 30.  We will let participants know if we have room for them by Saturday November 1. Space is limited and will depend on how many mentors we can recruit for the sessions.

Interested in being a mentor? If you already have experience with Python, please consider helping out at the sessions as a mentor. Being a mentor will involve working with participants and talking them through the challenges they encounter in programming. No special preparation is required. And we’ll feed you!  Because we want to keep a very high mentor-to-student ratio, recruiting more mentors means we can accept more participants. If you’re interested,  email makohill@uw.edu. Also, thank you, thank you, thank you!

About the Organizers

The workshops are being coordinated, organized by Benjamin Mako Hill, Frances Hocutt, Jonathan Morgan, and Tommy Guy and a long list of other volunteer mentors. The workshops have been designed with lots of help and inspiration from Shauna Gordon-McKeon and Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch and lots of inspiration from the Boston Python Workshop.

These workshops are an all-volunteer effort. Fundamentally, we’re doing this because we’re programmers and data scientists who work in online communities and we really believe that the skills you’ll learn in these sessions are important and empowering tools.

The workshops are being supported by the UW Department of Communication and the eSciences Institute.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Benjamin Mako Hill at makohill@uw.edu.

[Reposted from Benjamin Mako Hill’s blog Copyrighteous.]

Earlier this year, I helped plan and run the Community Data Science Workshops: a series of three (and a half) day-long workshops designed to help people learn basic programming and tools for data science tools in order to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia and Twitter. You can read our initial announcement for more about the vision.

The workshops were organized by myself, Jonathan Morgan from the Wikimedia Foundation, long-time Software Carpentry teacher Tommy Guy, and a group of 15 volunteer “mentors” who taught project-based afternoon sessions and worked one-on-one with more than 50 participants. With overwhelming interest, we were ultimately constrained by the number of mentors who volunteered. Unfortunately, this meant that we had to turn away most of the people who applied. Although it was not emphasized in recruiting or used as a selection criteria, a majority of the participants were women.

The workshops were all free of charge and sponsored by the UW Department of Communication, who provided space, and the eScience Institute, who provided food.

The curriculum for all four session session is online:

• Friday April 4th: Setup and Programming Practice
• Saturday April 5th: Introduction to Python
• Saturday May 3rd: Building data sets using web APIs
• Saturday May 31st: Data analysis and visualization

The workshops were designed for people with no previous programming experience. Although most our participants were from the University of Washington, we had non-UW participants from as far away as Vancouver, BC.

Feedback we collected suggests that the sessions were a huge success, that participants learned enormously, and that the workshops filled a real need in the Seattle community. Between workshops, participants organized meet-ups to practice their programming skills.

Most excitingly, just as we based our curriculum for the first session on the Boston Python Workshop’s, others have been building off our curriculum. Elana Hashman, who was a mentor at the CDSW, is coordinating a set of Python Workshops for Beginners with a group at the University of Waterloo and with sponsorship from the Python Software Foundation using curriculum based on ours. I also know of two university classes that are tentatively being planned around the curriculum.

Because a growing number of groups have been contacting us about running their own events based on the CDSW — and because we are currently making plans to run another round of workshops in Seattle late this fall — I coordinated with a number of other mentors to go over participant feedback and to put together a long write-up of our reflections in the form of a post-mortem. Although our emphasis is on things we might do differently, we provide a broad range of information that might be useful to people running a CDSW (e.g., our budget). Please let me know if you are planning to run an event so we can coordinate going forward.

The Community Data Science Workshops are a series of project-based workshops being held at the University of Washington for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, Twitter, free  and open source software, and civic media.

The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience. The goal is to bring together both researchers and academics as well as participants and leaders in online communities.  The workshops will all be free of charge. Participants from outside UW are encouraged to apply.

There will be three workshops held from 9am-4pm on three Saturdays in April and May. Each session will involve a period for lecture and technical demonstrations in the morning. This will be followed by a lunch graciously provided by the eSciences Institute at UW.  The rest  of the day will be followed by group work on programming and data science projects supported by more experienced mentors.

Introduction to Programming (April 5) — Programming is an essential tool for data science and is useful for solving many other problems. The goal of this session will be to introduce programming in the Python programming language. Each participant will leave having solved a real problem and will have built their first real programin their group. We will be relying on the curriculum from the Boston Python Workshops. Because we expect to hit the ground running, we will also run a session in the evening of Friday April 4 to help participants get software installed.

Importing Data from Wikipedia and Twitter APIs (May 3)  — An important step in doing data science is collecting data. The goal of this session will be to teach participants how to get data from the public application programming interfaces (“APIs”) common to many social media and online communities. Although, we will use the APIs provided by Wikipedia and Twitter in the session, the principles and techniques are common to many online communities.

Data Analysis and Visualization (May 31) — The goal of data science is to use data to answer questions. In our final session, we will use the Python skills we learned in the first session and the datasets we’ve created in the second to ask and answer common questions about the activity and health of online communities. We will focus on learning how to generate visualizations, create summary statistics, and test hypotheses.

Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and graphical visualizations to answer questions like:

• Are new contributors to an article in Wikipedia sticking around longer or contributing more than people who joined last year?
• Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter hashtag?
• Are people who participated in a Wikipedia outreach event staying involved? How do they compare to people that joined the project outside of the event?

Our first session will be modeled after the Boston Python Workshops, but the curriculum of the later sessions is still in development and will be influenced by the needs of the participants.

Sign up and Participate!

Participants! If you are interested in learning data science, fill out our registration form here. The deadline to register is Wednesday March 26th.  We will let participants know if we have room for them by Saturday March 29th. Space is limited and will depend on how many mentors we can recruit for the sessions.

Interested in being a mentor? If you already have experience with Python, please consider helping out at the sessions as a mentor. Being a mentor will involve working with participants and talking them through the challenges they encounter in programming. No special preparation is required. And we’ll feed you!  Because we want to keep a very high mentor to student ratio, recruiting more mentors means we can accept more participants. If you’re interested,  email makohill@uw.edu. Also, thank you, thank you, thank you!

About the Organizers

The workshops are being coordinated, organized, and led by Benjamin Mako Hill at the University of Washington Department of Communication and Jonathan Morgan at the Wikimedia Foundation. They have been designed with lots of help and inspiration from Shauna Gordon-McKeon and Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch and lots of inspiration from the Boston Python Workshop.

These workshops are an all-volunteer effort. Fundamentally, we’re doing this because we’re programmers and data scientists that work in online communities and we really believe that the skills you’ll learn in these sessions are important and empowering tools.

The workshops are being supported by the UW Department of Communication and the eSciences Institute.

If you have any questions or concerns, contact Benjamin Mako Hill at makohill@uw.edu.