OpenCon is a conference and a global community dedicated to advancing open research and education. OpenCon Cascadia is a satellite of OpenCon, designed to foster the growth of Pacific Northwest communities that are making research and scholarship more open, inclusive, and reusable. Inspired by the success and focus of the international OpenCon conference, this satellite event will realize the following interrelated outcomes:
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Community Building: We will showcase existing regional work and projects related to open data, open access, and open education. Our goal is to create connections between individuals and organizations operating in different domain areas, such as basic science researchers, computational scientists, students, funders, librarians, and academic administrators.
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Problem Solving: OpenCon Cascadia will provide opportunities for individuals and organizations to identify technical and non-technical issues that impede the realization and impact of open science and scholarship, and design solutions that leverage the contributions of diverse perspectives.
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Collaboration: The conference will include dedicated facilitation, time and space to find collaborators, brainstorm, and work on projects. It will be the start of ongoing work to build solutions together.
OpenCon Cascadia will seek to engage individuals and organizations that are involved in improving research, academic culture, or public access to scholarship. This includes, but is not limited to, technical, policy, education, and citizen-science type projects. Our core organizing committee already has representatives from Oregon Health & Science University, Portland State University, Oregon State University, the Gates Foundation, Code for Science and Society, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
The following content is inspired by the international OpenCon organization GitHub. We thank the organizing committee for being open and share with us their materials.
In an effort to walk the talk, while increasing our effectiveness, transparency and openness we are sharing our organizing processes openly with our community.
On this repository you will find the discussions we ace having, what we are planning, what we are making and more.
Github was designed for coders to store their projects, but we're using it differently. Here, we'll use Github to replace internal email lists, gantt charts, and to-do lists with a more open system.
If you're not familiar with using Github, please don't hesitate to reach out. For OC members, all that is required is making an account and responding to messages, which is possible over email as usual. This section provides more information on the different parts of the system and how we'll use them.
If you're on the Organizing Committee, you can ignore this section, unless you want to be notified about everything. For most people, the right setting is "watch", which is the default.
You can adjust your email notification settings as shown by the Gif. Usually, you'll only need to update these if you never want to get an email, or you want to get every email from the repo (even if it doesn't directly concern you).
If Gifs aren't your thing...
Up in the top right, there's a button that says 'Watch'; click it, and set yourself to 'Watching'. This will send you email notifications of new discussions; if you don't want email, but would like an alert just on GitHub, change the setting in Settings -> Notification Center.
Issues are where we host discussions about OpenCon. They're easy to find above.
You can respond to an issue from your email client. When you get a notification, just hit reply - no need to use the site.
We're trying to be open by default, and use this to centre all to-do's and discussion. So, the answer is always, except:
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when it concerns fundraising, personnel (or personal) information, something we've not announced yet (e.g a big grant activity), or other highly sensitive issues.
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when it's a todo that you can complete without anyone else's input (to track it, a "- [ ] " on an existing issue might make more sense).
If you're unsure, ask.
- You can start an issue via email by sending your message to cloo+sparcopen/[email protected]. The subject is your issue title, the email body is the issue comment.
When something is "done". This will depend on the issue at hand. A good practice is to, early on, define what "done" means.
Anyone can, and should, close an issue when it is done.
Closing an issue is a reversible process. If you think something needs more discussion or something was missed - reopen.
By default, only a small fraction of the people included in a repository will be included. To reach out to more you can:
- "@" them directly by username
- "@" them by team name:
NOTE: Many OC members will not see messages by default.
Assigning is used to help people understand who can take action on an issue and who's responsible.
Labels add metadata and enable easy sorting of issues.
For now, we're generally not using GitHub to store files. Instead, we're going to stick to our normal Google Docs ways, and simply link out to our drive and important files.
Ask @dasaderi / [email protected]