I am helping organize another round of the Community Data Science Workshop series with UW professor Benjamin Mako Hill, UW PhD Candidate Dharma Dailey, and a growing cast of dedicated data science mentorship professionals.
The workshops will be three and a half day-long workshops in April and May 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, civic media, etc. These will be an improved version of the
workshops we have run in the spring and fall last year.
The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience and, thanks to sponsorship from UW's
eScience Institute and
Department of Communication, are free of charge and open to anyone.
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?Details and dates are online here: http://wiki.communitydata.cc/CDSW_Spring_2015If you are interested in participating, fill out our registration at the link above before April 3. Register soon because we have been oversubscribed both previous times we have run these workshops.
If you already know how to program in Python, it would be really 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’re interested, there’s a link on the page above or you can send me an email.
Regards,
Jonathan
(On behalf of Mako, Tommy, Ben, Dharma, the
Community Data Science Research Group, and all the CDSW mentors.)