All posts (Page 110 of 122)
Key to the success of rOpenSci is our community and we want to hear more regularly from our members, and foster new interactions among the group. In addition, community calls are a way for us to give important updates, and get feedback on them.
We tentatively plan on doing community calls once per month. The format of rOpenSci community calls could be of various types. We could have community members show off software they’ve been working on, or users demo use cases. Instead, we could focus more on conversations. For this first call, we’ll be doing a combination of demonstration and discussion. We would like to experiment with the call format over the next few months before we decide on one or more approaches that work best.
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Why open data growth
At rOpenSci we try to make it easier for people to use open data and contribute open data to the community. The question often arises: How much open data do we have? Another angle on this topic is: How much is open data growing?
We provide access to dozens of data respositories through our various packages. We asked many of them to share numbers on the amount of data they have, and if possible, growth of their data holdings through time. Many of our partners came through with some data. Note that the below is biased towards those data sources we were able to get data from, and those that we were able to get growth through time data. In addition, note that much of the data we use below was from fall of 2013 (last year) - so the below is based on somewhat old data, but surely the trends are likely still the same now.
...You only know two things about Docker. First, it uses Linux containers. Second, the Internet won’t shut up about it.
– attributed to Solomon Hykes, Docker CEO
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So what is Docker?
Docker is a relatively new open source application and service, which is seeing interest across a number of areas. It uses recent Linux kernel features (containers, namespaces) to shield processes. While its use (superficially) resembles that of virtual machines, it is much more lightweight as it operates at the level of a single process (rather than an emulation of an entire OS layer). This also allows it to start almost instantly, require very little resources and hence permits an order of magnitude more deployments per host than a virtual machine.
...I’m very pleased to announce that rOpenSci has signed a comprehensive fiscal sponsorship agreement with the NumFocus foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that supports R&D for open source scientific software projects. We are delighted to be in the company of esteemed projects such as IPython and Julia that share our goal of promoting reproducible research practices across many scientific communities and developing a rich ecosystem of tools for open scientific computing.
All of our activities, from hackathons and the ambassador program to salaries for our full-time personnel, are 100% grant supported at this time. While we will continue to pursue all possible federal and private funding to support future efforts, our continued success necessitates a diverse funding model. Given the current funding climate additional donations from individuals, institutions, and corporations are critical to help us remain sustainable and give us the ability to scale.
...The week after labor day, we had the pleasure of attending the NCEAS open science codefest event in Santa Barbara. It was great to meet folks like the new arrivals at the expanding Mozilla Science Lab, Bill Mills and Abby Cabunoc (Bill even already has a great post up about the codefest), and see old friends from NCEAS and DataONE, among many more. This 2.5 day event ran smoothly thanks to the leadership of Matt Jones. The event was run in unconference style. Each idea was then posted up on a giant post it on the wall and people had 30 minutes to wander the room choosing projects. The approach allowed for a consensus based filtering of ideas. We had the opportunity to suggest some ideas, and a chance to help out with others. Here’s an overview of the projects the rOpenSci team worked on and what we accomplished at the open science codefest....
