News

Event Fund grantee, Data Umbrella, has been hosting regular data sprints to grow the skills and confidence of first-time and regular contributors to open source software communities such as scikit-learn, a widely used machine learning library of Python. In this post–part of an ongoing series that focuses on the organizing processes, tools, and practices used to run successful Event Fund-sponsored Open Science events–we learn about some of the changes that Data Umbrella incorporated when shifting from in-person data sprints to an online format.

Participant teams have been thinking about upskilling and hiring; building out onboarding and other documentation for their projects; and thinking about how to curate meaningful events and hold accessible space.

We are excited to share the Open Post Academics' "Toolkit for Cross-Disciplinary Workshops" which emerged from the Event-Fund supported "Open Problem Workshop" held in 2021. The workshop asked how real world problems in the field of data science could call for the expertise of PhDs from all fields. In the resulting toolkit, the team shares some nine activities and suggestions on how to facilitate cross-disciplinary activities in an online, collaborative setting.

2021 was a year of both growth and community resilience through the ongoing global pandemic.