Greetings fellow Cascadians!

By popular demand, I am helping organize yet another round of Community Data Science Workshop http://wiki.communitydata.cc/Community_Data_Science_Workshops_(Fall_2015) with Benjamin Mako Hill. Registration is open until October 2nd! Read on for details.

The series consists of three-and-a-half day-long workshops in October and November. They are intended 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 projects, civic media, etc. These will be an improved version of the workshops we have run for the past two years http://escience.washington.edu/blog/community-data-science-workshops-spring-2015 .

The Community Data Science workshops are for people with no previous programming experience and, thanks to sponsorship from UW's eScience Institute http://escience.washington.edu/ and Department of Communication http://www.com.washington.edu/, are free of charge and open to anyone.

Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to use web data and the Python programming language to gather and manipulate data, test hypotheses, and generate graphical visualizations to answer questions like:

- Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter hashtag?

- Which bike routes in Seattle receive the most traffic on rainy Winter days?

- Who has written the most Wikipedia articles about Harry Potter?

The skills you learn in these workshops can be used to gather & analyze data from thousands of other sources. All you need is a lively imagination and an open API.

Details and dates are online here: http://wiki.communitydata.cc/CDSW_Fall_2015

If you are interested in participating, fill out our registration at the link above before October 2nd. Priority is given to people who can attend all the sessions. 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 program page linked above, or you can send me an email.

Hope to see you there,

Jonathan

(On behalf of Mako, Mika, Tommy, Ben, Dharma, the Community Data Science Research Group http://communitydata.cc/, and all the CDSW mentors.)