Posted by s.aragon on 11 April 2019 - 9:07am 

Photo by Estée Janssens.

By Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute.

Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) took place from Monday 1st to Wednesday 3rd April 2019 in the West Park Teaching Hub at Loughborough University, Loughborough. We’re still catching up after three full days dedicated to interoperability, documentation, training and sustainability. Before we publish a detailed Collaborations Workshop 2019 report, we would like to share our top highlights from our days in Loughborough. The night before CW19 kick-started, some attendees gathered to play board games. We had a friendly and fun night playing cooperative games such as Hanabi.

We would do better if we had @PHerterich playing with us. pic.twitter.com/eKLsaxIDBp

— Raniere Silva (@rgaiacs) March 31, 2019

Catherine Stihler, Chief Executive Officer of Open Knowledge International, opened delegates' eyes for the challenges that we are facing to protect interoperability and sustainability in different spaces.

Our first keynote is by @C_Stihler, who spoke about how we are living at a time when openness is at risk - facts are considered as fake news, & the importance of Open advocates getting involved with policy to ensure that our representatives vote in our interests. #CollabW19

— Dr. Rachael Ainsworth (@rachaelevelyn) April 1, 2019

Franziska Heine, Head of Software & Development at Wikimedia Deutschland, spoke about the importance of data and included interesting cases from Wikipedia world.

Today in awesome data harvesting at #Collabw19: Franziska Heine shows us causes of death of noble families from ⁦@wikidata⁩. Strong showing from “horse falls”, as well as the obvious “murder” ? pic.twitter.com/VoX0HCbgbu

— Daniel Hobley (@Siccar_Point) April 1, 2019

Googlers Sarah Maddox and Sharif Salah lead the Tech Writing 101 session that had a full room and provided great exercises for delegates to think out of the box when writing documentation.

Tech Writing 101 during #CollabW19 We have a full room. Expect pull requests improving the documentation soon. pic.twitter.com/ludxmuRCFl

— Raniere Silva (@rgaiacs) April 1, 2019

Sorrel won the Reusable Cup Raffle.

And the winner ???? of the #CollabW19ReusableCup ruffle is @LTUCompsci pic.twitter.com/pg5Cw0JO2r

— DVD (@DVDGC13) April 1, 2019

And, thanks to our attendees who brought reusable cups and bottles, we made a huge impact avoiding disposable cups.

So #CollabW19ReusableCup has a real effect: spoke to catering staff this morning and they said the so far only used 10% of the cups they would usually use at a conference this size. Yay us! #CollabW19

— Patricia Herterich (@PHerterich) April 2, 2019

The walk at the end of the first day keeps being popular among our attendees. Thanks to Melodee H. Beals who guide us on the Olympic Torch Walk!

Early birds enjoyed the first days of spring walking on the Fruit Route. No fruit to pick yet but beautiful blossoms to inspire the second day of Collaborations Workshop.

Niall Beard, University of Manchester, shared his experience in the art and science of organising and labelling training websites to support usability and findability in the context of ELIXIR's Training Portal, TeSS.

Search engines are useless for finding training! Yes! @niall_beard introducing @ELIXIREurope and their training database. #CollabW19

— Patricia Herterich (@PHerterich) April 2, 2019

Patricia Herterich, University of Birmingham, brought FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) to the discussion and asked delegates to give back tools and training to their communities.

How can we train researchers about interoperability and the importance of metadata, vocabularies and tools to make data and software FAIR? We as a community need to provide tools and training @PHerterich #collabw19

— Sarah Stewart (@BioStew) April 2, 2019

The winners of the best Collaborative Ideas were Dan Hobley, Cerys Lewis, Connah Kendrick, Kirstie Whitaker and Adrian Castravete.

YAAAAAS! My team won the best collaborative idea prize! Our idea is the #DocutorButton - a little plug in for #Sphinx so that a user can easily open an issue if the documentation is unclear when they’re using your tool! #CollabW19 ???????✨????? pic.twitter.com/9QfQ520UzK

— Kirstie Whitaker (@kirstie_j) April 2, 2019

The winners of the Hackday were Arshad Emmambux, Louise Bowler, Patricia Herterich, Niall Beard and Victor Koppejan with carpenTREE.

Getting started on #carpentree our hackday project to navigate @thecarpentries lessons and create pathways for learners and teachers! #CollabW19 pic.twitter.com/1rqRBnj1T6

— Patricia Herterich (@PHerterich) April 3, 2019

What are your highlights from Collaborations Workshop? Did you learn something new in Loughborough?

We’d love to hear and read your thoughts and experience of the event, so feel free to get in touch at info@software.ac.uk. If you’d like to write a blog post about Collaborations Workshop, please let us know.