As the spread of coronavirus continues to impact our personal and professional lives in significant ways, I wanted to start a thread to discuss how Pangeo may play a role in helping us all get through this challenging time. If you have ideas or thoughts on this subject, please share below.
A virtual community
The Pangeo Community has always been an online community. We’re all quite accustomed to interacting with one another on GitHub/Discourse/Whereby/Twitter/etc. While our in-person communities are experiencing major disruptions to their routines, online communities are becoming a (more) natural place to interact with friends/peers/colleagues.
In addition to having weekly community developer meetings and regularly scheduled working group meetings, we’re starting a new 30-minute coffee break on Tuesdays/Thursdays 8a PT (11a ET). These coffee breaks will meet on https://whereby.com/pangeo and will not have any set agenda, just a structured time slot to say hi to other humans. I’ll be there most days, and expect guest appearances from my little ones (in other words, kids are welcome).
Open source help desk
Some of our colleagues have started a COVID-19 Open-Source Help Desk. For those looking for a way to contribute to the fight against the virus, this may be something you want to participate in.
@jhamman This is a great idea! Just one correction: I think you meant to write that the 30-minute coffee break will be on Tuesdays/Thursdays at 8a PT (11a ET)…not 11a MT. Correct?
I also want to highlight this call for assistance with modelling the COVID-19 pandemic from the UK royal society, aimed at the wider computational scientific modelling community. They basically want to supplement their maxed-out epidemiologists by assembling teams of competent modellers with transferable skills from other scientific fields. It’s open to non-UK experts too, and the deadline for filling out the form is Thursday 02 April at 5pm BST.
The call makes it sound like they are particularly interested in scaling existing techniques to much larger datasets, which sounds like a task for dask experts to me…
I’m also trying to assemble a distributed team of individual researchers from various groups to apply to this together, for those of use who aren’t in a group that can wholly redirect towards this. If you’re interested in being involved with that then please fill out this form!.
I’m working with a group that is interested in understanding the implications of the COVID-19 epidemic for air quality and climate responses to emissions perturbations. We are working to identify and prioritize a variety of data useful for this research, it seems like the data we are interested in will overlap a lot with your group. We are having a call to discuss 4/28, perhaps you (or anyone interested) can join? (email me)
