Mozfest 2014

mozfest-2014.md

###Title

Academic publishing using Git and GitHub

###Additional faciliators

Jessica Lord
Chrissie Brodigan
Andrew Nesbitt
Karthik Ram
IPython folks?

###What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

This session will be able helping researchers to learn how to write, collaborate, share and publish academic content on GitHub. This includes academic manuscripts such as papers and conference proceedings, data and teaching resources. We'll explore some of the different collaboration models that have been used to create, review and share open research products on GitHub.

###How do you see that working?

Our goal is for those individuals with experience and a passion for a particular authoring/publishing tool to give an overview of that tool and share with the group their experiences and best practices.

Example tools we'll learn how to use include IPython Notebooks, WriteLatex and RCloud as well as learning how to use natively supported technologies such as Markdown and GitHub Pages.

Short demonstrations of tools from individuals and then breakout sessions for hands-on help is our goal.

###How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?

As we're planning on breaking up into smaller groups based upon interest we can likely accommodate a range of participant numbers.

###What do you see as outcomes after the festival? How will you and your participants take the learning and activities forward?

This session aims to give people hands-on experience of using tools that encourage more open and collaborative use of the web within academia. One outcome we'd expect is for more academics to be using these tools in their daily (research) lives.

One possible outcome would be to document some of these activities on the Mozilla Science Lab website and blog.

Should probably add something in here about publishing data too?

One outcome we'd expect is for more academics to be using these tools in their daily (research) lives.

Change academics to researchers to broaden scope. Mozfest is not exactly a big conference for academics and given that there will be other folks like journos, librarians etc, "researchers" would make it more inclusive.

Example tools we'll learn how to use include IPython Notebooks, WriteLatex and RCloud as well as learning how to use natively supported technologies such as Markdown and GitHub Pages.

RCloud is not something most novices can use. I would replace with R markdown which is more general.

Should probably add something in here about publishing data too?

Perhaps, but given that GitHub is not equipped to deal with binary data or large tabular files (i.e. it doesn't preview, or do the nice table filtering), we should skip but briefly address time permitting.