- Do we need a schedule? How come no one accepted the calendar invite?
- Invite wasn't received so Jon will send out the schedule to the mailing list to remind everyone about which office hours they are attending
- Outreach/Promoting the office hours
- "Trick or Meet"
- We discussed going door-to-door to make introductions and ask survey questions directly to researchers (perhaps during one of the office hours).
- The idea would be to engage people directly and have a short conversation about their computing needs/issues and talk about who we are and what we're trying to do with the Office hours
- Call it "Trick or Meet" and make it Halloween themed because we're soooo cool
- Jon/Dan will make up a poster and handout about office hours that we can distribute
- Dan will ask Sheraz about what's involved with poster approval at CAMH
- Jon will contact Sheraz about sending out an office hours note to his mailing lists
- We should all be advertising at our lab meetings
- Nancy (from MR Unit) suggested that she and Sofia could attend office hours some weeks to answer MR Imaging specific questions
- Jon created a document to log our office hours activites (so that we have something to refer to later when making our case about the need for computing support): bit.ly/office-hours-log
David asked that we look over the computing survey that Natalia has put together, but Natalia wasn't present
- Jon is in the process of booking rooms for some week in November. Will bring dates and times for next week and we can plan the workshops concretely.
- Peter raised an important point: for some of the workshops we are likely going to use the SCC to give people access to a Linux terminal to practice (bash, version control, python even), but that a) people won't have access to bash/git/python in the same way on their personal CAMH computer, and b) we don't necessarily want people logging into the SCC in order to do their routine or file intensive work
- Therefore, in our workshops we should be sure to show attendees how to setup their own computing environment for non-SCC work
- And also how to appropriately use the SCC (although this is covered in the SCC workshop)
- See below for a list of workshop survey answers from the last time Jon ran workshops
- We discussed Gitlab/Github Enterprise costs and features
- Qing will ask David/Cyrus about hosting internally with external access on the CAMH network. Is this possible?
- Qing will ask David about funds to support the costs
- Eric Huang (student) dropped office hours and told us about his initiative "Peers Teaching Peers" in which students/trainees meet once a week and discuss methods.
- Good opportunity to work together to support each other (promoting and referring people)
- Jon notes that Software Carpentry is having a one day retreat for instructors and helpers to learn from one another. If anyone is interested in attending, contact Jon.
August 2015 workshop survey responses to the question What other computing skills are you interested in learning?
- I am not sure at the moment but anything that makes the navigation of mass spectrometry or RNA-seq data easier.
- Advanced R
- data visualization
- making research figures and graphs.
- R and Python as well as get an intro to linux!
- Just as much of this as possible, please!
- Learning how to do some basic coding. I just want to gain some familiarity with it to expand my skills in ways I can tackle statistical questions with different software.
- matlab
- Not sure this is a computing skill, but I would be interested in learning general principles about how best to keep things (files, scripts etc) organized over multiple iterations of the same analysis.
- Parallel computing
- Parallel shell scripting, and refreshing general shell scripting knowledge.
- Programming in python
- Python and R
- Python, R, Matlab, SQL, Perl
- R
- R, linux
- SCC
- Usage of R for general purposes and for imaging analysis.
- When it's a good idea/bad idea to automate tasks. Who at camh can help? How can ppl without background in compsci pick up these skills?