Notes from the SciPy 2023 BoF ============================= Notes from the Birds of a Feather session on Friday, July 15, 2022, to gather feedback for SciPy 2022 and ideas for SciPy 2023. Keynote ------- * Andrej Karpathy (director of artificial intelligence tesla) * Someone from CZI/Chan Zuckerberg Biohub * Someone who has the history of SciPy/stack * Sarah Hooker - fairness in AI * Joy Buolamwini * Rachel Thomas? * History of computing * Historian of science or technology * Katy Huff (Department of Energy) * Matthew Brett * Nadia (Eghbal) Asparouhova * Kyle Cranmner * Matthew Feickert contact * Josh Bloom * Joseph DeRisi, or someone from the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. * They were instrumental in the early covid testing capacity in California and the US. Learned about him in Michael Lewis' The Premonition. * Brad Voytek at UCSD * Very cool neuro work, mostly in Python * `https://voyteklab.com/ `_ * `https://voyteklab.com/code `_ * and a course taught with Ashely Juavinett on Neural Data Science * `https://github.com/BIPN162 `_ * https://voyteklab.com/data%20science/neural-data-science/ * Olivia Guest * `https://oliviaguest.com/ `_ * has a ton of good, provocative ideas about the relationships between theory <-> models <-> code * `https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67X0TpnQeO0&t=4s `_ * topic editor at JOSS on comp. cog. Neuro and has been very involved with initiatives like ReScience C Tracks and Mini-Symposia ------------------------ * Machine Learning needs to be a track, otherwise it takes over all the other tracks * A track not in English. Spanish? * Live captioned/live translated. * Physics & Astronomy * Social Sciences / Computational Social Science & Digital Humanities * Matthias Bussonier has a contact who could be chair * Education summit (pycon) - how to teach scientific stack * Teen Track * Maintainers Track / Community track * Building your community * Governance * Packaging and sharing * Life sciences / Neurology * Shorter talks: 20+5 or 15+3 * BoFs and Lightning Talks all of Friday Tutorials --------- * Topics * Invite specific presenters to force balance * Feedback * Machine learning in particular (GPU resource donation); cloud compute and resources * Binder is used heavily; should we donate to them? * Which tutorial is advanced/beginner? Not clear this year * Have a learner persona for each tutorial * Guidance for tutorial presenters, recommendations about what is successful * Binder driven tutorials eliminates problems * Reviewing is easier to do with binder as well * Should we "mandate" this? * Matthew Feickert * RE: using Binder, the PyHEP conferences use Binder each year. I'm the contact for PyHEP to Binder and the workflow that they have requested we useis: * Have a representative of your org come to the Jupyter/Binder monthly meetings and make a request * Have a representative of your org make the PRs to update pod allocations for the days that are needed about a day before and then remove them when they are done * If you can, try to monitor usage to ensure that that you aren't going to overwhelm the resources you requested * They don't want money but they want you to explicitly mention that you're using them and show slides Hybrid ------ * Funneling questions through Slack levels the playing field * Ask in person - can clarify question or have a dialogue * Alternate between in person and in slack * Many conflicting ideas/feedback on this topic * In-person, online, and interaction between the two * Pre-recorded talks, played/broadcasted in a dedicated room, with presenter in-person to answer questions * Presenter can also respond to slack questions during the talk if the talk is pre recorded * First time we did virtual, we did prerecorded and elected to not do it the next year because it was very disengaging * Not engaging to have people just sitting and watching a screen * Need a person or a dialogue in the room * Virtual poster session concurrently with live poster session * Some posters did not get any feedback on the posters they worked hard to make * Hard to know where the virtual session was and where to "put" the posters * Rethinking model * Neuromatch conference - distributed local meetings - watch party to go gather and watch together `xref `_ (see bof-virtual-vs-hybrid) * Would a poster session in gather town work for virtual posters? * Linux was terrible on gather town (crashed every time tried to open/close a poster) Diversity Efforts ----------------- * Accessibility - live captioning/translation * Sponsor for this specifically General Feedback ---------------- * Younger or less polished tutorials so people aren't afraid to be first time presenters * Example: Lightning talks in years past were created 10 min before the talk; this year a lot of them were polished so newcomers may expect to have to prepare well in advance (intimidating) * As a follow-up to @Matthias Bussonnier's comments about re-lowering the bar so that folks feel comfortable to create "crappy" last-minute lightning talks, perhaps offering one lightning talk session that is not recorded and posted to YouTube could help there. People might feel less pressure to create a polished talk. * Give a talk or BoF or mini-symposia * Help people getting started on speaking or presenting at SciPy * Feedback mechanism for all * How did you do on the tutorials; posters; BoFs etc. * Pass this information onto future chairs * Historical trends should be considered (not the same people over and over) * Badges with names on both sides * Github handle and twitter handle * Avatar as well * Pronoun stickers that are much more visible * Maintainers track should be able to submit to proceedings * Mini-sprint track mid-week (can't stay through the weekend) * History breadcrumb - sprints used to be at the start but those leading the sprints were giving the talks/tutorials so the sprints never happened * Sprints moved to end of conference for this reason * Diversity luncheon elevated to keynote not a lunch * Just repeating the idea here of updating / maintaining the docs to help with knowledge transfer `https://github.com/scipy-conference/scipy-conference `_ (this haven't been touched for 3 years) * Maybe this could also include * Calendars * Checklists * And maybe this could be a thing we do at a "SciPy 2023 kickoff sprint" in early fall * Should we re-visit the "mini-symposia" naming convention? * Drop the name call it track; some cross cutting and some distinct BoFs ---- * PyCon "open spaces" idea (throw a topic on the board and discuss) * Mixture of both (pre-selected and open spaces) * More BoFs submitted than what we had sessions for * Can you do a "grassroots" approach; even if you didn't get selected as an "official" BoF gather and meet (free rooms) Mentorship Program ------------------ * 69 participants (virtual + in person) * Some in person connected with virtual attendees * Good to have some people connect at the start of the conference if they didn't know anyone coming * Send out a survey to gather feedback * Mentors came back and said they had good sessions