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
  • Olivia Guest

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