TL;DR
We want to get researchers in a room to experiment with infrastructure for making open data science easier. We're focusing on three infrastructural strategies (1) improving metadata and indexing open online community datasets, (2) an online querying service that makes processing, joining, and extracting subsets of data easier and (3) defining a protocol for reporting research methods that will make studies easier to replicate/extend.

Title: Breaking into new Data-Spaces: Infrastructure for Open Community Science
Date: February 27, 2016
Application deadline: December 31, 2015
Conference website: http://cscw.acm.org/2016/program/workshops.php#WP-10
Apply/info: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Breaking_into_new_Data-Spaces
Participants announced: January 15, 2016

We encourage you to apply to a CSCW 2016 workshop focused on advancing your ability to do work with datasets from online communities. We will experiment with documentation protocols and technologies that are designed to make the process of “breaking into” a new dataset more tractable for researchers studying open online communities.

Who can participate
Anyone who builds, manages, studies or is interested in studying open online communities can apply. Fill out our application form and tell us a bit about your relevant interests and experience.

Organizers
Aaron Halfaker, Jonathan Morgan, Yuvaraj Pandian - Wikimedia Foundation
Elizabeth Thiry - Boundless
Kristen Schuster, A.J. Million, Sean Goggins - University of Missouri
William Rand - University of Maryland
David Laniado - Eurecat

Abstract
Despite being easily accessible, open online community (OOC) data can be difficult to use effectively. In order to access and analyze large amounts of data, researchers must first become familiar with the meaning of data values. Then they must find a way to obtain and process the datasets to extract their desired vectors of behavior and content. This process is fraught with problems that are solved (through great difficulty) over and over again by each research team/lab that breaks into datasets for a new OOC.

In this workshop, we'll experiment with documentation protocols and technologies that are designed to make the process of “breaking into” a new dataset more tractable for researchers studying open online communities. This workshop’s purpose is to bring together researchers to test these systems and discover problems and missed opportunities to support iteration. Participants will also be given the opportunity to use state-of-the-art documentation and technologies to break into a new collection of datasets. This workshop is the direct result of a call to action to build infrastructure for data sharing between researchers from past CSCW workshops and related conferences.

For more information and to apply see: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Breaking_into_new_Data-Spaces