Hi folks. I’m directing the project office for the new WCRP Regional Information for Society (RIfS) effort. Last week I was at the WCRP Open Science Conference in Kigali. There was a side event on tools for CMIP and CORDEX, with presentations from @jbusecke and @aradhakrishnanGFDL about Pangeo. I spontaneously jumped up to answer questions and talked to four or five very interested people who had some basic clarifying questions.
Take-aways:
There was very strong representation from the “Global South”, and especially Africa at this meeting. People are really looking for resources to be able to do their science. They will not as easily find someone to talk to in-person to help them get started with a new toolset. And they may have issues I wouldn’t have, even using the cloud, due to bandwidth limitations, inconsistent connectivity, and latency being far from the machine they’re using. I don’t mean to try to represent the folks I met at the meeting – just sharing my take-aways.
Proposal to discuss:
Since one person directly asked if I’d follow-up and help them get started with Pangeo, it occurred to me that there could be a more structured effort to coordinate partnering WCRP-connected people from the global south with experienced Pangeo users. We could offer some training to the latter beforehand, so everyone would be on the same page with the commitment.
Would love to know how that idea lands with you all? Has anyone tried to set something like this up before? If there is anyone in particular who would like to explore the possibilities in more depth, I’m happy to have a call as well, so please reach out.
there could be a more structured effort to coordinate partnering WCRP-connected people from the global south with experienced Pangeo users.
I’m very interested in contributing to this effort.
Has anyone tried to set something like this up before?
There have been many event (e.g. various HackWeeks and more recently, ClimateMatchAcademy) but I’ll leave it to the organizers to comment. My impression is that it works well in-person.
Just wanted to call Project Pythia to your attention. We are the education arm of Pangeo. We’d be happy to have a broader conversation on this topic. Feel free to drop in to our next community meeting on Monday, Nov 6. Details are available from our calendar, which I’m just noticing needs to be updated. However, the info for this coming monday is correct.
I would also be interested in something like this. To meet the lofty goal of making climate science research truly globally accessible, it’s not enough to have open tools (the Pangeo stack), not enough to have open data (pangeo forge cloud etc.), not enough to document how to use them really well (Pythia cookbooks), but some form of direct knowledge transfer also has to take place.
Also sounds related to @paigem 's work with the Ghana summer school.
Excited to hear more from you all. Yes, I do think that facilitating longer-term relationships between individuals in our communities could be helpful here.
I am very interested in getting involved here, and would like to discuss some ways that LEAP could get involved in this effort. In particular we could discuss providing folks access to our cloud computing resources LEAP-Pangeo to not only provide instructions, but also a way to run those, and directly develop them into science results. I am unsure that I can make the Monday meeting though.
Maybe @paigem can speak to this in more detail, but I was under the impression that keeping the cloud compute/storage together (even if far away) was actually quite workable under limited bandwidth situations.
I just double checked and I have another meeting there. Please let me know where is the best place to catch up here. Thanks for starting the conversation @thenaomig!
I love the idea of a structured mentoring program connecting Pangeo-related folks with scientists from the Global South! I teach Python and computing at the Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School in Nigeria and Ghana (COESSING) and have taught our virtual component of the school via Cloud-based JupyterHubs (run by 2i2c). We have also run in-person schools, and have used a mixture of JupyterHubs and installation on local computers for our computational platforms. I have absolutely loved working with the West African ocean science communities, and have given a lot of thought as to how we can provide better pathways for such communities to access and work with state-of-the-art scientific tools and datasets.
Anyway, I could go into more detail, but suffice it to say that absolutely love this idea! This is also well-timed, as we will soon be announcing a new phase of the Pangeo community as we have been accepted to be fiscally sponsored by NumFOCUS. This makes Pangeo a legal entity and will give us more flexibility to receive funds, and is a great excuse to spring board into new one exciting initiatives such as the one you are suggesting @thenaomig.
Like @jbusecke I also have a conflicting meeting during the Project Pythia community call next Monday, so please do keep us in the loop as to how we can contribute!
Hi folks. I’m excited there is some interest. I wrote down a few thoughts, just to have a starting point. This might not be the right structure. Feel free to comment: Concept note on a mentorship partnership - Google Docs
and look forward to chatting more.
Hi @thenaomig, I’m making an agenda for today’s Pythia Community Meeting. It would be great if you could give a brief pitch today, along the lines of your concept note.
Hi folks, Thanks for the responses so far. I’m going to schedule a meeting to follow-up and discuss more. I’m looking at just after American Thanksgiving. If you are interested, please respond to this little poll Discuss Mentorship Partnership - When2meet
I will post here again when we’ve settled on a time.