On three Saturdays in April and May, Benjamin Mako Hill and I will be
running day-long project-based workshops at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Anyone can participate--you don't have to be affiliated with UW. Although you do have to be physically present in Seattle :(
The workshops are for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, free and open source software, Twitter and civic media.
The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience. We hope to bring together researchers and participants in online communities.
The 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?
Details and dates are online here:
http://networkcollectiv.es/2014/03/09/community-data-science-workshops/
If you are interested in participating, fill out our registration form linked from the URL above before March 26th.
If you already know how to program (in Python), it would be awesome if you would volunteer 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. If you are interested, send me an email.