Biking home from work today I was listening to the video of the second day of the NIH Generalist Repositories Workshop and heard mention of a spreadsheet being used to compare data repositories. Sure enough, the notes for that day mention a spreadsheet called Repository and Index Software (Work in Progress) as well as a repo on GitHub that was recently updated to include this spreadsheet.

The repo says,

“We created this list to:

Today I watched a short video about how Mozilla is moving from IRC to Matrix by Rubén Martín from Mozilla Reps. The slides are available as well.

As far as I know, this is how the change unfolded:

• 2019-04-26 IRC will go away
• 2019-05-14 explanation of process
• 2019-09-06 four possibilities announced
• 2019-09-12 feedback gathering
• 2019-12-19 decision to go with Matrix announced
• 2019-12-19 welcome from Matrix
• 2020-02-20 we are live

Now the Matrix page in the Mozilla wiki explains how to connect and the fact that federation is enabled.

With the exception of my first post and a short description of some editor and deployment mechanics, I’ve tried to avoid getting meta with this blog, but I thought I’d mention that I’ve settled on a “no blogging on vacation” policy.

Eight days have passed since my last blog post. I had a nice streak going, blogging every day of 2020. I was staring to feel like Doogie Howser, typing away in the evening, reflecting on something that happened that day.

It’s Valentine’s Day which means it’s Love Data Week. Lots of cute tweets in the air.

In addition, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) hosted a workshop on “The Role of Generalist Repositories to Enhance Data Discoverability and Reuse,” which I learned about in a thread on the Dataverse mailing list.

The video of day 1 is available and I really enjoyed the first keynote by Sayeed Choudhury, especially around 31:40 where he talked about the triad of academia, government, and the private sector:

Today I had an absolutely fabulous call with Ed Thomson and Rimas Silkaitis from GitHub.

As I mentioned in my post about my talk at FOSDEM a couple weeks ago, Ed attended my talk and approached me afterwards saying he’d like to hear more the take Dataverse has on scientific reproducibility.

Here are the notes from our meeting. It was so much fun talking to these guys. It makes me want to go back and listen to all the episodes of All Things Git, which I believe is where I first encountered Ed. That podcast is what prompted me to @mention him in a Dataverse issue. Also, I don’t think I mentioned this to Ed, but it’s extremely cool that he’s a maintainer of libgit2. He also has a 31 part (!) blog series about GitHub Actions that I’m hoping to read some day. My short post on GitHub Actions only scratches the surface.

Today I popped into the Frictionless Data chat room to ask a quick question about a potential integration. This was a follow up on yesterday’s Dataverse Community Call when Lilly Winfree joined (thank you!) to introduce herself and projects she’s working on. I recently attended her talk called Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research and as I said on the call, I highly recommend watching the video. Her slides are great too.

It’s funny, we have issues going back five years about some of their technology.

Tonight I went to a fantastic talk by Amy X. Zhang called “Systems to Improve Online Discussion.”

I met Amy last year at LibrePlanet and shortly afterward made a note to myself to follow up with her about communication platforms.

Digging through old emails, it looks like I first reached out to her in June 2015. I head heard good things about Hackstack at the first Dataverse Community Meeting and read her paper called “Mailing Lists: Why Are They Still Here, What’s Wrong With Them, and How Can We Fix Them?” She built a system called Murmur to address these problems and I signed up for an account right away. If you check the About page for Good Labs, you can see it’s the mailing list software we use.

Today I listened to a talk by Georgia Bullen called Beyond the Pile of Knobs: Usability and Design for Privacy, Security, Safety & Consent Privacy given in the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM. Her slides are available but the video is well worth listening to or watching.

She advises,

“Don’t just focus on the majority cases, focus on the high-risk users and understand their threats.”

She calls these the “stress cases,” the people who are in the most high-risk settings, and suggests that what works for them will likely work for most people.

My daughter was introduced to Desmos in her 8th grade math class and she’s having a blast creating art with it.

The Wikipedia article for Desmos describes it as an advanced graphing calculator and mentions toward the end that “another peculiar use of the calculator involves the creation of graphic arts.”

Sure enough, the Staff Picks: Creative Art link on the Desmos home page reveals pictures of a shark, a chick, a seal, and more.

The first Inkscape Vectors meeting of 2020 was awesome and I returned for more! An issue is used to track the agenda. As usual, the meeting was logged.

Here was the agenda, the stuff crossed out that wasn’t talked about:

• Tutorials Funding @ryangorley @CRogers (10 min)
• Inkscope @tim (I will schedule a separate short meeting)
• 2020 Big Picture Goals @all (10 min)
• Revitalize Bug Hunt & bug migration (5 min)
• Inkscape Survey @victorwestmann (10 min)
• Social media stats update (NA) #131
• website feature - highlight user project @brynn (10 min)
• building Documentation team, make announcement @brynn (5 min)
• Release (5 min)

Tutorials Funding @ryangorley @CRogers (10 min)

Abstract - Users on all major social media platforms have expressed a desire for instructional video offered by the project.