Study Group - GSoC

Welcome to the planning repository for the 2017 Study Group Google Summer of Code (GSOC) project!

If you're interested in contributing, you should find all of the details here. We've centralized it into this repository, because the Study Groups project is distributed accross multiple repositories, and we'd like to keep things tidy and focused for the duration of the mentorship. Issues and roadmap goals will reflect changes accross multiple repositories on Github, so you'll have the opportunity to contribute to multiple aspects of this project.

Project Title

Study Group Activity Visualizations

Project Description

As seen on the Mozilla GSOC wiki, this project is part of 3 proposed projects under the "Mozilla Science Lab." Ours is the third project on that list, and involves creating visualizations of our distributed Study Group community activity, and unifying data collected from our mulitiple Study Group repositories.

For more background, the Mozilla Science Lab is a part of the Mozilla Foundation devoted to supporting a global community of scientists who want to open source their research and their learning materials. The Study Group program is a part of that initiative, and centers around a simple website that leverages Jekyll blog software and Github issues to enable the creation of a website for peer-learning groups. These groups collaborate and come together for in-person workshops and events that teach scientific programming concepts, open science practice, and scripting languages. Study Group Leads fork the Study Group Website Repository and customize the attached website (gh-page) to run meetups all over the world. They organize regular events, skill shares, co-work and create community around open science.

Currently, we have several repositories for Study Group Resources, which we welcome you to review, see the table below. Assess the usability and user experience of each, and let us know what you think in the issues here.

Project Resources

Resource	Description	Additional Links	Owner
Study Group Website	main repository for Study Groups, Leads fork this repository to start their own study group and customize their website	code + issues	Aurelia
Study Group Orientation Guide	gitbook that explains how to start a study group and start planning events/workshops	code + issues	Zannah
Study Group Lessons	submoduled lesson outlines for a variety of programming and open science topics	check out the issues for additional lesson suggestions or implementations of the "standard" repo lessons	Aurelia
Study Group Events Tracker	website for submitting events with more detailed metadata on attendees and topics	code + issues	Aurelia
Study Group Events Crawler	set of scripts for pulling events from the forked Study Group repositories and creation JSON for visualizations	code + issues	Aurelia
Mozilla Study Group Project	part of the Mozilla Science Lab website, where the study group project and map of Study Group locations is featured		Mozilla Science Lab
Gitter Chat	community chat room for all study group related issues and activity around the world	Questions specifically about GSOC? Ask them in the gitter chat for gsoc	Mozilla Science Lab

Problem Statement

Right now there's no easy way to see all the study group events, or to otherwise visualize Study Group project participation. We'd like to change that 😃.

• Check the CONTRIBUTOR.md file to learn more about our objectives
• Read through our ROADMAP.md for the broader goals for this project
• Review the issues queue for some specific ways to dive into development, or contribute your own

Expected Outcomes

Ideally, we'd like to have the following outcomes, subject to applicant interest:

• a set of visualizations (maps/graphs/charts) that can be continuously and easily updated with stats on the Study Group Project (how many forks we have, what is the "activity" level or recent commit counts on those repos, how many _posts directory additions aka events have been made to those repos, how many members in the config.yml are logged, what features are being used and what features are being ignored)
• script(s) that would link our Study Group Events site, currently populated by a manual-entry Google form, with events in the forked directory of all study groups; there's a starter set of scripts for this in the sg-events repository, but is currently just data and not yet a set of visualizations
• a comprehensive and easily updated report, or process for creating reports about what is working well in the Study Group repositories, what isn't being used, and what needs to change to solicit new contributors, and Study Group Leads.

Preferred Skills

The Study Group project is primarily composed of Github infrastructure, Javascript, and occasionally Python. Contributors with Node and Javascript visualization skills are encouraged to apply!

All are welcome to contribute as the methods of contribution vary, review some of the issues and decide how to best apply your skills.

Getting Started

Ready to start contributing to this GSOC project? AWESOME, thanks for reading this far.

• Take a look at the existing Study Groups and map visualization on the Mozilla Study Group Project Page
• Review the various repositories in the table above, under Project Description
• Consider the Problem Statement and Outcomes in this README
• Draft a proposal for your approach to solving some of these issues and achieving these outcomes
• Send your proposal to aurelia[at]mozillafoundation[dot]org
• You can expect followup on your proposal if chosen by the end of the GSOC proposal period, hopefully before!

Mentors

Aurelia Moser, Community Lead, Mozilla Science Lab, @auremoser, aurelia[at]mozillafoundation[dot]org

DevLog

The Dev log is a place for our GSOC project to be tracked from week to week.

This template is not our work but is based on Karan's devlog (source ) with modifications by Mikhail. The source code was cleaned from content and enriched with some comments to help people get set up.

The design of the devlog page uses Material Design with Roboto font.

• Karan Desai - initial template
• Mikhail Mishin - modified template

Setup and Configuration

To set up your personal devlog you just have to clone this repository and fill it with content. Read more about using Jekyll with GitHub page on GitHub and/or Jekyll.

You should change your personal information and links to your project in _config.yml. The site title and description is also adjustable in this file.

Tracking Progress

The devlog will show progress entries grouped by categories. Each entry is prefixed with its posting date and can hold arbitrary content in Markdown format.

Have a look at the example instance instance.

Please find posting examples in the _posts directory of the gh-pages branch.

To start blogging, just create a file for each entry in _posts. The filename should start with the date, e.g., 2017-07-01-first_entry.md. The Front Matter holds information on the category and date.

---
date: 2017-07-01
category: week1
---

< .. content .. >

---

Glossary

• Study Group - Mozilla Study Groups are fun, informal meetups of your friends and colleagues from around your local institution or town to share skills, stories and ideas on using code for research, and explore open research practices. The goal is to create a friendly, no-pressure environment where people can share their work, ask for help on a coding problem, and learn and work together with their peers. Anyone can start a Study Group.
• Study Group Lead - someone who forks the Study Group website repo, and begins leading a study group in his/her local community, with collaborators or without.
• "Events" - study group leads organize "events" or informal in-person meetings via the _posts directory (like this one) and the issues like (this one) in their forked Study Group websites. There is a guide for this in the Study Group README - how to setup your site.
• Fork - to create a copy of a repository on your own github, this is how Study Groups propogate: Study Group Leads create a Github account and select the "fork" button on the Study Group Website homepage to create their own study group and begin customizing their website, planning events and activities for their community.
• Submodule - on Github, a repository embedded in your main repository, you can read more about this process and why you might want to do it here, it's how the Study Group Lessons are logged in our Lessons repo.