Kaitlin Thaney, the director of the Mozilla Foundation’s Open Science Lab spoke to my database class about her vision for science to be as open as
software. Mozilla incubated Software Carpentry which runs two day boot
camps for graduate students in source control, Python, R, shell
scripting and sql. She explained how data analysis is an increasingly
integral part of science. She offered encouragement that the skills
that they were learning would serve them well.

She told students that the should seek out open source
communities in NYC. On line presence, on social coding sites such as
github, svn, mercurial and bitbucket are primary ways for both developers
and data scientists to get noticed. Students were told to go to hackathons
and experiment with mapping and open data where possible.

Even more than just saying it, Kaitlin followed up with a list of ways for students, faculty and staff to get involved with open science and civic computing. Her list appears below almost verbatim.

Civic Hall

• The new incubator space for civic tech companies, has a great list of events:

http://civichall.org/eve

BetaNYC

Newsletter, events, open data portals and more, all rooted in civic tech work in NYC:

http://www.meetup.com/betanyc/

Recommended meetup group

Slightly different, there’s an incredible group called Hacks/Hackers
that bring together civic hackers, developers, data folks and news
nerds. Really fascinating community – worth checking out:

http://hackshackers.com/

Friendly javascript

For those out there interested in Javascript, Kaitlin recommends
BrooklynJS – stellar crew (and quite fun, too):

http://brooklynjs.com/

I don’t know those folks but I am speaking at D3-NYC-JS. D3 is a
popular data visualization library in javascript.

http://www.meetup.com/NYC-D3-JS/

Insight data science

Insight is a seven week intensive training in data science (with
mentoring from top tech companies), run by a few close colleagues.

http://www.insightdataengineering.com/

VC Event list

Charlie O’Donnell, a NYC venture capitalist, curates a list of NYC
tech events and trainings. Worth signing up.

http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/weekly/

Nonprofit work for aspiring geeks and students

Looking to learn more about data and work to help charities /
nonprofits? Check out DataKind (they have regular meet ups,
hackathon-like DataDives and a great community.

http://www.datakind.org/

Admire the work Poitras, Greenwald?

Omidyar – a big funder in this space, have a civic tech night coming up in April. Snag a spot!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/omidyar-network-civic-tech-ignite-nyc-tickets-16070440119

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2015 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.