Feedback from 4OSS workshop in Ghent

[tobyhodges]

@mkuzak and I taught a 4OSS workshop in Ghent yesterday and got lots of very useful feedback from the participants in a "one up, one down" session at the end of the day. I include all of the comments from the group below:

[+] bus factor
[-] too long about positives of open software (preaching to the converted)
[+] GitHub tutorials were clear
[-] unclear entry level for workshop (I was already aware of a lot of the material)
[+] licensing info was very informative
[-] unsure how to merge changes in GitHub
[+] good energy from instructors
[-] a lot of new terms, can be a bit overwhelming
[-] convert more things to exercises
[+] controlled vocabularies and metadata
[-] would be good to have a "bring your own software" section/exercise
[+] time for questions and discussion
[-] types of exercises were too similar, could be varied and redundancy removed
[+] interavtivity and teamwork, discussion
[-] logistics, who speaks when
[+] how to find software section
[+] location!
[-] could fit into half-day or full day with more exercises and chance to actually do the things taught

For my part, I had mixed feelings about the workshop: some parts went well and others needed improvement. This was in part due to a lack of time to adequately prepare, unfortunately. Things that went well included: the licensing section, which Mateusz kept short and people seemed to find quite useful; the open discussions and time for answering questions and "going deep" on topics that the group were particularly interested in; the metadata section, which I think was the most new information for the group. Things that could be improved: more exercises and hands-on demo, such as getting the participants to work together on setting up GitHub Pages, adding a license and metadata to the pages, and adding CONTRIBUTING.md, CONDUCT.md, etc files to the associated repository.

I expect Mateusz can add to these with his own reflections.

I hope we'll both be able to create some more specific Issues and PRs to address them over the coming weeks.

[c-martinez]

Interesting -- I tend to be reluctant to show "hands on" how to add software to zenodo, to avoid polluting zenodo with hello-world type examples. On the other hand, adding a citation file (CFF) on a "bring your own software" style is something we could add to the lesson.

[c-martinez]

Having said that -- we could use zenodo sandbox for lessons: http://sandbox.zenodo.org.