[ Please feel free to forward this on to any other people or lists you think might be interested! ]
Greetings Cascadian Wikimedians!
Along with fellow Wikimedians Jonathan Morgan and Frances Hocutt and many others, I am helping run three and a half day-long workshops in November 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. This will be a new and improved of our successful (and oversubscribed!) spring workshops. They will be hosted at UW.
The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience and will be 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://networkcollectiv.es/2014/10/16/cdsw-november-2014/
If you are interested in participating, fill out our registration form there before October 30th.
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, send me an email.
Regards, Mako