Coding for Science & Society

Coding for Science & Society

Let’s get excited about open science, reproducibility, civic technology, and open data! Come meet folks who code for science and society.

There will be four talks about work that makes society and science better through code. Speakers will present for 10-20 minutes on a half-baked idea, trend, interesting project, or open source community related to coding for science and society.

If you have something to talk about, click below to fill out the form and we’ll get back to you ASAP:

Sign up for a talk! (https://goo.gl/forms/lDCyyc26E0YeCsi83)

Doors open at 7pm, Talks start 7:30pm. Find us on the third floor of co.up Coworking Space, Adalbertstraße 8, Berlin.

Confirmed Talks

RefugeesWork Nina Breznik (@ninabreznik), Alex Praetorius (@serapath)

All our projects are made with zero budget so with pure love and dedication for our mission: open source & transparency, inclusiveness, digital literacy and open organization. (https://github.com/SquatUp/projects)

We are hacktivists at RefugeesWork.com, community builders at CodingAmigos and a solopreneurs at Fairydust.agency. We love debugging the global economy through different projects. Nina comes from Slovenia where she studied Public administration with policy analysis and Slavic languages with literature, later ventured into startups and ended up in Berlin coding in Ruby and JS. Alex started studying Business to prepare for a corporate career and soon pivoted to startups and later to activism and coding.

What if told you there was an npm for scientific models? Chris Adams (@mrchrisadams)

Last November last year, Bret Viktor wrote a seminal essay, What can a technologist do about climate change?, about the ways technologists can direct their skills to address one of the defining challenges of our generation. In this essay, he introduces the the idea of 'model driven debate', citing the availability of easily explorable models grounded in evidence as a way to have more informed public discourse, and poses the question:

What if there were an “npm” for scientific models? Back in 2010, environmental tech startup AMEE began spent a few million dollars hiring a team of scientists to trawl through hundreds of IPCC documents and academic papers to take these scientific models, and make them available over an API. These thousands of models were coincidentally written in javascript, and were released under an MIT licence. In this 15 minute talk, Chris Adams will tell the story behind the creation, share a half-baked plan for making these available via npm, and hopefully learn something from the rest of the group about making an npm for scientific models would work in the real world.

Dat: Peer to Peer open data for science, journalism, and governmentThe Dat Team (http://dat-data.com/team)

Dat is a grant-funded, open-source, decentralized data sharing tool for efficiently versioning and syncing changes to data.

Built in Node.js (https://nodejs.org/), Dat can be used to version data locally, or to share and sync data over the internet. Dat includes an optional peer-to-peer distribution system, meaning that the more widely that a dataset is shared, the faster it is for users to retrieve or sync a copy, and the more redundant that the dataset’s availability becomes.

By building tools to build and share data pipelines, we aim to bring to data a style of collaboration similar to what Git brings to source code, while bringing a style of sharing similar to what Dropbox brings to file generally.Note that while Dat is a designed as a general-purpose tool, our team focuses on its use in the sciences.

Academic writing with Pandoc, the universal document converterAlbert

Pandoc allows conversion from and to multiple markup formats. It also offers mechanisms to programmatically alter documents and supports features important for academic writing. It is also used by reproducible-research friendly tools like RStudio. The talk will give a very short intro to Pandoc's features and will outline future development efforts.

If you are attending, organizing or speaking at our event, you are required to agree with our Code of Conduct (http://berlincodeofconduct.org/).