CW15 Hackday

labwrap

Presentation and source code.

Team member: Gerard Roma

Climate data provenance with Annalist

Plans and their presentation (which contains links to source code).

Team member: Graham Klyne, Charles Roberts

Visualising the supercomputing community on twitter

Team members: Oliver Laslett, Mikhail Kabeshov, Alison Packer and Nanlin Jin

Docker container for GAP

Presentation and project page.

Team members: Alexander Konovolov, Devasena Inupakutika, Sarah Mount

Citable IPython notebooks running in Docker containers for reproducible computation research

Team members: Peter Clarke, Jim Morrison

SimonCodes

​Project page and website.

Team members: David Perez-Suarez, Tom Pollard, Joshua Potter, James Baker, Matueuz Kuzak

Bio-Node-RED

Team members: Bruno Viera, Boris Adryan

You could code all night and all day at the CW15 Hackday but you might be interested in knowing how you are going to be judged, if so - this section is for you!

Background

Each idea/pitch needs to be presented and registered by the evening of Thursday 26 March 2015 to be officially part of the CW15 Hackday (HD). When registering your idea/pitch you will be asked about the team leader, details of what you plan and the category of your idea/pitch (e.g. Data/Code Sharing, Reproducible Research, Bring-Your-Own-Data (BYOD) or Other).

Each idea will have a Team leader; the leader could be the idea owner, the pitch author/leader or someone who has decided to form a team around someone else’s idea/open data.

Each team can have a maximum of six people who are not SSI Staff in it. We recommend a minimum of two people in a team; we have a limit on the number of teams - if there are more than 15, preference will be given to the bigger teams (not who came first). If a team becomes too big we may ask you to become two teams but working on the same pitch/idea.

Once your team is formed towards the latter part of the evening of the 26th March, we strongly suggest you have a free and frank discussion with your team about the licensing around the code and data that is being used so it’s upfront.

Judges

The judges for the HD will be:

• Laurent Gatto, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, University of Cambridge.
• Mark Basham, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, Diamond Light Source.
• Simon Hettrick, Software Sustainability Institute.
• Aleksandra Pawlik, Software Sustainability Institute.
• Mark Stillwell, Co-Chair RSE Community, Imperial College London.
• Shoaib Sufi, Community Leader, Software Sustainability Institute
•  

You will be assigned a Judge during the evening of 26 March 2015 who will visit each team during the following day, see how they are doing, offer advice and ask questions. They may also prod you to start writing up your presentation and thinking about your demo of the HD work you have been doing to try and offset the ‘just one more commit’ urge that can set into a team as presentation/demo time approaches. Judges may make notes on the teams they are visiting to help assess teamwork, they may also visit you more than once during the day.

All decisions of the judges with regards to marking and prize giving are final and neither they nor the Institute will entertain any appeals.

Criteria

What follows are the criteria for how your HD entry will be judged.

During the 5 minute presentation of your HD work each team must show how they address the criteria, failure to do this might lose a good entry from getting a good score during its assessment.

Each category will be scored from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest); weighting may be applied to the categories but the judges will decide on this during their meeting on the HD.

1. Novelty, creativity, coolness and/or usefulness

What’s the problem that is being solved and how are you trying to solve it?

Are you doing something new, better, slick or really useful to yourself or others?

Is the solution purely self-serving, or is it enabling in some other way. Just doing your normal everyday work with a bit of extra help may not get the best marks unless you provide reasons as to how this benefits a wider community of potential users/developers etc.

The advice here is indicative; other justifications in this space are welcome (within the constraints of presenting).

2. Implementation and infrastructure  

Is a source code repository being used? Is there documentation? Are appropriate services and infrastructure being used (e.g. cloud computing, databases)?

If you are building on existing work, it’s essential that you are clear about what was done specifically at the HD in terms of adding features and functionality etc. (If this is not clear you will lose marks).

Does the solution work for the stated purpose - can this be shown during the demo?

3. Demo and presentation

Did the presentation and demo fulfill the criteria that is being sought here?

Did the team communicate the essence of why they did what they did and why it was important?

4. Project reproducibility

Was the source code available on an open repository at presentation time? Teams may choose to work open or work closed. However, building and being able to build on each others work during the HD will be viewed favourably.

If you happen to decide that you want a publication from this work then you may choose to be open about your methods but not your data, for example.

Ideally there should be a README covering configuration, make and run instructions included with the code. In addition there should be a brief description of the project and what the software/scripts do along with a license. 

5. Future potential

Was it clear how the work could be taken forward in the future, could it modify existing work or be part of a new paper, initiative or bid?

Were ideas of future steps provided?

6. Team work

Was the team led well, were they able to involve all interested team members?

Were non-technical members directed towards meaningful contributions; e.g. documentation, testing, usability and logo design?

Did software practices support synchronised working and decrease duplication?

Was the team atmosphere healthy; disagreement are fine, but were they conducted agreeably?

Did it appear enjoyable and/or fun to be part of that team?

It's not the winning, it's the taking part that counts! At the Institute we broadly agree with that sentiment, however there is nothing quite like competitions and prizes to liven things up.

For the hackday, we have some prizes that are themselves great to hack.

Each member of the winning team (up to a maximum of 6 people) will be awarded an iPad mini with Retina display. There will also be a second place prize of Raspberry Pi 2 kits (again up to a maximum of 6 people in the team). Members of the CW15 organising group will view presentations and demos from each team that registered on the evening of the 26 March and choose what in their opinion is the best hack according to the judging criteria. The judges decision is final and participants must stay until 5pm on Friday 27 March 2015 to be eligible to receive prizes.

Exclusions

Current SSI Staff members are excluded from winning any of the prizes at CW15; so having them in your collaborative ideas group or hackday team is free effort!

Any questions about this - please contact us.