Community outreach call coming up – 6 June, all welcome!

Update: If you missed the call, the recording is available on YouTube

InterMine runs quarterly Community Outreach calls, targeted to interest people in the overlap between life sciences, open source, and open science, with a few InterMine specific updates sprinkled in as well. Most times we host one or two guest speakers who work in scientific outreach or have done an interesting InterMine-related project we’d like to spotlight. We aim to welcome anyone interested in community outreach and generally try to avoid overly techie themes.

The next outreach call coming up on June 6th, 5PM UK time, with two exciting guest speakers, plus we’ll briefly mention the six Google Summer of Code students working with us over the next few months. 

Please help to spread the word by sharing with colleagues and friends – the more the merrier!

Speakers:

• Malvika Sharan is a computational biologist and a community outreach coordinator for EMBL Bio-IT, which fosters a community of bioinformaticians. She will be talking about inconclusiveness in Open Science Communities using examples from her work at EMBL and her involvement in The Carpentries, SSI, and Mozilla.
• Emmy Tsang: I’m the new Innovation Community Manager at eLife and am now running the eLife Innovation Initiative. I’m going to talk about the #eLifeSprint– our effort to drive and support collaborations in developing open-source software for open science, and the latest developments of Reproducible Document Stack project, which include a roadmap towards sharing reproducible research.

Agenda and joining details: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VhfFbOwx95UZP-sRDVib8HNGPCXCfnpDVGh8VAbeI0c/edit – we’ll be using Zoom for this call, rather than GotoMeeting.

When: 6 June, 2019 at 17:00 UK time / or in your timezone: http://arewemeetingyet.com/London/2019-06-06/17:00/InterMine%20Community%20Outreach%20Meeting

We’re adopting a code of conduct!

TL;DR:

Please read our Code of Conduct draft and comment if you need to.

Longer:

A growing and important movement in open source communities is to adopt a code of conduct, which generally governs behaviour amongst community members, and provides backing to enforce necessary actions if anyone within the community behaves in an unacceptable or unwelcoming manner. We haven’t had any problems, and we’d like things to stay that way in the future.

If the past is anything to go by, we’ll set this code of conduct up and rarely or never need to enforce anything, but it’s better to have clear guidelines in place and not need them, than vice versa. We’d also like to get this in place before anything happens, rather than as an obvious too-late response to an incident – not that we’re anticipating anything!

The draft we’ve put together is adapted quite closely from the Django code of conduct. We’re particularly grateful to them for licencing it under a creative commons attribution licence so we could re-use it.

Read the InterMine Code of Conduct draft here.

Questions?

If you’d like more info about codes of conduct – why they’re important, what topics they cover, etc., please see:

• Open source guide to Codes of Conduct
• Code of Conduct templates for research laboratories
• Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines

Comments, or questions that weren’t answered by the links above?

Feel free to comment on this post, tweet us, email yo@intermine.org, or info@intermine.org. Please comment by the 19th of March 2019.

 

Header image from flickr, taken by Mike McSharry and licenced under CC-BY-2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikemcsharry/5360225083/

Looking ahead: InterMine+Google Summer of Code 2018. Could you be a mentor?

2017 is coming to an end, and I have to say it’s been a fabulous one! I’ll probably post a “cool things InterMine did this year” round-up in a week or two – but in the meantime, here’s my final Google Summer of Code blog for you all!  We’ll cover the InterMine swag just sent out across the globe, as well as plans for next year – and how you can help out.

Thank-you gifts for mentors and students

Last week, we posted care packages to all our GSoC mentors and summer students, in the form of t-shirts, stickers, and pens. The postal-service-wrinkled shirt shown above is the women’s fit shirt printed on black; unisex shirts are a slightly lighter grey colour. If you filled out the swag survey when it was sent to you, your gift should be with you soon! Tweet us your images of the items in use for extra InterMine Cool Points 😎.

GSoC 2018 – call for project ideas and mentors!

Early 2017, we put together an ideas list for GSoC projects – InterMine’s projects are numbers 3 to 9. If you want to get more of an idea what it’s like to apply, (or be a mentor), read our application guidance from last year.

Do you have a nifty idea, or an InterMine itch you’d like to scratch?

Please share it with us! Add it to our 2018 Google Summer of Code ideas list, or if you need to sound things out and discuss them a little bit, comment on the GitHub issue, or email the dev list. You can even propose several ideas, if you like! Please add all ideas by the end of 14th of December (end of this week).

Would you like to try mentoring?

Fancy a chance to earn some nifty exclusive swag like pictured above? Add your name as a possible mentor to an existing idea (or your own new idea). You can always drop us a line if you want to discuss things first. We like projects to have more than one mentor if possible.

Maybe you’re a student thinking of GSoC?

Awesome! If you have your own InterMine project idea (whether it’s brand new or you’ve already started it), or if one of the ideas on our ideas list lights your fire, it’s not too early to start talking with potential mentors about it. The application guidance we mentioned above would be a good read, too.

 

 

InterMine community roundup: June 2017

Here are some of the exciting things that have been happening in the InterMine community recently:

• InterMineR: GSoC student Konstantinos has been updating our R client, InterMineR, which is now ready for early testing and feedback. Download and install via dev tools!
• Similarity Project: Samyadeep’s GSoC work identifying similarities between objects in InterMine has produced an intriguing early graph: https://github.com/intermine/similarity/blob/master/intermine.pdf (also, who knew pdfs could be animated?)
• InterMine iOS app: Everyone who added their name to our iOS testing sign-up form should have gotten an email from GSoC student Nadia telling you to sign up to Hockey, the third-party application we’re using to distribute test builds. After you install Hockey and add your device ID, you’ll get an email notifying you when there’s a new test build available. You can submit any feedback via Hockey, or create a ticket in the repo. (github repo)
• InterMine Registry: Leonardo’s GSoC project has an early endpoint up that can be examined – check it out here: https://intermine-registry.herokuapp.com/registry/api-docs/ – how did we manage without a registry for so long? 😅  (github repo)
• Neo4j: GSoC student Yash Sharma has shared a nice blog post about structuring InterMine metadata in Neo4j. (InterMine neo4j github repo)
• Python cookbook: Like we mentioned in a previous post, Samarth has been creating a set of InterMine python tutorials. Tutorial 3 on filtering and constraints has just been published.
• Fly correlation webapp: Basheer set up this Fly correlation webapp which takes a Drosophila gene and retrieves a list of correlated genes based on gene properties. (github repo)

Thanks to everyone who has contributed including students and their mentors. You guys are awesome!

excited Kermit via GIPHY

Have you done anything exciting with InterMine lately? email info [at] intermine [dot] org, tweet us at @intermineorg, or pop into chat.intermine.org to tell us about it… we’d love to feature you in a future round-up!