pyOpenSci Meeting Notes - 6 March 2019

https://hackmd.io/bn8W_GwFSqaPOBRzovfBvQ

Attendees

• Leah Wasser

• Max Joseph

• Jenny Palomino

• Kylen Solvik

• Chris Holdgraf

• Luiz Irber

Agenda Items

1. Updates from Kylen - cookie cutter & dev guide are ready to go!

   • https://github.com/pyOpenSci/cookiecutter-pyopensci

   • https://github.com/pyOpenSci/dev_guide

Cookie Cutter

Luiz: cookie cutter is a good start. we can iterate in the future as more people become involved

• pytest only for testing

• removed non open source licenses

• worked with chris – documentation updates

• Need other testers to ensure this will work for people!

Dev Guide

• not a lot of new features - link cleanup and the “good better best” options for package dev

• package release guidelines for PyPI

2. Meeting with Joss next week!

3. Review participant list – anyone to add? who can contact whom on the list?

   • https://goo.gl/HNBmfa

   • provide home page of dev guide: https://pyopensci.github.io/dev_guide/intro

     • Leah/Kylen add info to pyopensci.org from dev guide, one pager, etc

     • LEAH WILL create pyOpenSci website and link to pyopensci.org

   • provide levels of involvement

     • minor: sharing of pyOpenSci with colleagues, providing contacts to other packages, coming to BOF at SciPy, add to GitHub organization

     • medium: come to a meeting, advisory board

     • high: become a reviewer

4. Review package list - which ones should we prioritize? Are there others we should consider

   • https://goo.gl/71uWSa

   • start with Contextily (Danny Arribas)

Package Management Issues To Consider

rOpenSci:

• once reviewed, the package CAN be transferred to ropensci repo (As an option)

• they expect the submitter to maintain the package, but in some cases they provide some level of maintenance and support.

  • example: if package breaks on cran, the maintainer is given 3 months to address the issue; if no response, rOpenSci steps in

  • Something to consider when targeting packages: can we maintain it if the maintainer is not available?

  • Potentially identify as second/backup maintainer

• that support can be helped along via the discourse channel

5. Community survey (to support Moore 3-pager). What data would be powerful to speak to the need for pyopensci

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OETzG9OASXIH3WdxyUUl_IDa4Ozfabj6T0HDDSqmkv4/edit

Data That We Could Collect

• COMMUNITY CAPACITY / CHALLENGES: why are people writing code and not turning into packages

• Discoverability: where do people go to find scientific python tools

• Number of packages with / without testing / docs

• People who have packages that want to grow a community, but the package is under their name (personal ownership vs community )

• For people maintaining a package: do you think docs could be improved, complete, is clear enough to cover the range of potential users… – chris can share some data on people’s use of docs —

• How often do you document your code?

• How do you document your code?

• What is the key challenge in documenting code…

• How and where did you learn to use python?

• What perspective someone’s docs takes – does it consider the less technical user, for the community etc

• Are there contributing guidelines? community direction that support building community

• Do you executable code in your docs and does it run??

• How many people have contributed to open source, how many people are interested? what are the challenges associated with contributing?

• TRAINING IDEA: documentation and python dev

From Chris: research on practices around documentation in the open source community.

Here’s a short blog post writeup: https://bids.berkeley.edu/publications/types-roles-and-practices-documentation-data-analytics-open-source-software-libraries

Here’s the paper that eventually came out: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10606-018-9333-1

Here’s the dataset that we collected: https://github.com/choldgraf/blog-documentation_questionnaire