Growing the Galaxy Community

[beatrizserrano]

Project Lead: @beatrizserrano

Mentor: @tnabtaf

Welcome to OLS-2! This issue will be used to track your project and progress during the program. Please use this checklist over the next few weeks as you start Open Life Science program 🎉.

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Week 1 (31 August - 4 September 2020): Meet your mentor!

• Create an account on GitHub
• Check if you have access to the HackMD notes set up for your meetings with your mentor
• Prepare to meet your mentor(s) by completing a short homework provided in the HackMD notes
• Complete your own copy of the open leadership self-assessment and share it to your mentor
  If you're a group, each teammate should complete this assessment individually. This is here to help you set your own personal goals during the program. No need to share your results, but be ready to share your thoughts with your mentor.
• Make sure you know when and how you'll be meeting with your mentor.

Before Week 2 (7 - 11 September 2020): Cohort Call (Welcome to Open Life Science!)

• Create an issue on the OLS-2 GitHub repository for your OLS work and share the link to your mentor.

• Draft a brief vision statement using your goals

  This lesson from the Open Leadership Training Series (OLTS) might be helpful

• Leave a comment on this issue with your draft vision statement & be ready to share this on the call

• Check the Syllabus for notes and connection info for all the cohort calls.

Before Week 3 (14 - 18 September 2020): Meet your mentor!

• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their vision statement
• Complete this compare and contrast assignment about current and desired community interactions and value exchanges
• Complete your Open Canvas (instructions, canvas)
• Share a link to your Open Canvas in your GitHub issue
• Start your Roadmap
• Comment on your issue with your draft Roadmap
• Suggest a cohort name at the bottom of the shared notes and vote on your favorite with a +1

Before Week 4 (21 - 25 September 2020): Cohort Call (Tooling and roadmapping for Open projects)

• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their open canvas.

Week 5 and later

• Create a GitHub repository for your project
• Add the link to your repository in your issue
• Use your canvas to start writing a README.md file, or landing page, for your project
• Link to your README in a comment on this issue
• Add an open license to your repository as a file called LICENSE.md
• Add a Code of Conduct to your repository as a file called CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• Invite new contributors to into your work!

This issue is here to help you keep track of work as you start Open Life Science program. Please refer to the OLS-2 Syllabus for more detailed weekly notes and assignments past week 4.

[beatrizserrano]

Vision statement

Galaxy is an open-source platform that allows scientists to run computational biology studies. The Galaxy community (users, developers, admins...) is growing all over the world and reaching new scientific fields. Time zones, and the growing number of work to manage such a big community, needs the help of a community manager in Europe working in close collaboration with other community managers around the world.

Our goal is to build a solid mentor-mentee team so that we can work together towards growing the global community and lasts beyond the 15 weeks of this program. The first step is to coordinate (through a monthly call) the outreach activities going on in Europe, the US, and Australia. We also want to support the African and Indian communities that are taking off (training, grant writing, staff exchange...).

[beatrizserrano]

Open Canvas

Link to slide

[tlaguna]

Hi Beatriz, Nice project idea!

I was thinking that maybe you can specify a little more about who benefits from the project, who is the "Galaxy community"? Is it only them?

Also, I think the project goal could be more specifically detailed: how you plan to manage the community?

Hope it helps ;-)

[KateSimpson]

Hi Beatriz,

I like your aim of starting a Global open-source community.
Do you know where you will start? It seems ambitious but exciting!

Look forward to hearing more as we go forward.

Kate :)

[beatrizserrano]

Thanks so much @tlaguna and @KateSimpson for your suggestions! I've updated the vision statement :)

[malvikasharan]

@all-contributors please add @beatrizserrano for idea and content.

[allcontributors]

@malvikasharan

I've put up a pull request to add @beatrizserrano! 🎉

[hzahroh]

@beatrizserrano I'm a Galaxy user. I think this is an awesome idea. I like your open canvas. Will the community include non-IT biologists?

[beatrizserrano]

@hzahroh thanks a lot!
Sure, the primary focus of Galaxy is to enable researchers without a strong computational background to perform their scientific analysis :)

[tnabtaf]

@hzahroh It is great to see your voice! We are hoping that Galaxy will again be on the program for INCOB this year (although I won't be there, unfortunately).

Bea and I were discussing encouraging participation of non-IT biologists in yesterday's GCC2021 organizer call. We did this successfully at GCC2019 and are hoping to repeat that success in 2021.

If you have any suggestions for how we can encourage biologist participation, please do let us know.

And good luck with the APBioNet election!
Dave C

[hzahroh]

@tnabtaf Hi Dave, it's so great to meet you here. Thank you for responding to my comment. It's always a great pleasure to have you and Galaxy at InCoB. This year, we are also grateful for Galaxy support. Hope to meet you again at next InCoB(s).

It's awesome what you did for the community with GCC2019. I guess APBioNet can learn from Galaxy to bring it for InCoB or InSyB, or perhaps collaborate.

Thank you, Dave :). Even if I don't get elected, the whole process is still a great learning experience for me 😃

Btw, please help support our latest initiative, APBioNetTalks and kindly share your thoughts.
Hilya

[pvanheus]

Vision statement

Galaxy is an open-source platform that allows scientists to run computational biology studies. The Galaxy community (users, developers, admins...) is growing all over the world and reaching new scientific fields. Time zones, and the growing number of work to manage such a big community, needs the help of a community manager in Europe working in close collaboration with other community managers around the world.

Our goal is to build a solid mentor-mentee team so that we can work together towards growing the global community and lasts beyond the 15 weeks of this program. The first step is to coordinate (through a monthly call) the outreach activities going on in Europe, the US, and Australia. We also want to support the African and Indian communities that are taking off (training, grant writing, staff exchange...).

Your statement has some laudable goals but I'm not 100% clear on the vision. What makes the Galaxy community a community rather than a list of Galaxy users?

[beatrizserrano]

Thank you @pvanheus for your thought-provoking question. It made me think about the concept of community and how the Galaxy project fits in that definition. A community is usually defined as the group of people sharing the same interests or values, which could hold true for a list of users too. However, I wouldn't limit the Galaxy community to just the users, would rather extend it to the interplay between users, developers, admins, trainers, etc. And that interplay is the key for me: all of the pieces fit together and communicate to create a complex ecosystem based on the interaction. The engagement, the willingness to help others and work together makes it a successful community. That's actually my ultimate motivation, to be able to create true relationships between humans. Hope this clarifies the vision or at least how I see it! :) Thanks again!