At our first Pangeo Oceania meeting on June 18th, we did a poll to see what attendees would like to get out of Pangeo Oceania meetings. Ideally, we would like future Pangeo Oceania meetings to reflect these responses. Here are the results of the poll as a bar chart:
In the “other” category, we had a lively discussion during the meeting and the following topics came up:
Influencing priorities
Cross-community links between life sciences and geosciences
Collaboration with community partners
Career and mentorship
Information about different use cases for data access and what data providers can do to better support them
Education
How we can integrate and introduce Pangeo at an undergraduate/postgraduate level when training our next generation of climate scientists
We’re missing a bridge between analysing data at HPC sites and the pangeo approach is primarily cloud based
Advertising the community and what it can offer. For example, I don’t think there is anyone from the Bureau of Meteorology today. I know some people are starting to use xarray and dask there. Can the Pangeo community help them get started? How do they know the community exists?
Promoting the community and technologies and helping organisations and be open to new data science infrastructures. I think there is a lot of unrealized value already in python / pangeo stack but not used because of conservative IT.
Some initial thoughts of ideas we could implement to address some of the above results:
Informal tutorials might address several of the most popular categories: learn new software, advanced training, Pangeo training. These could include someone walking through different software tutorials, including those that already exist in the Pangeo Gallery. Even though these tutorials are already available, it can still be nice to be walked through some code and have the potential to ask questions as you go.
Career/networking: we can encourage Oceania-based job openings in Pangeo-related fields to be posted on Discourse with tags Oceania and Jobs. This is currently done in the wider Pangeo community, and (especially as an early career myself!) it’s been interesting to see what jobs are available in this space. Or perhaps there is already a central place for listing climate-related scientific computing jobs in Oceania?
Mentoring: One idea is to set up mentoring pairs or small groups. E.g. try to pair people up who have differing skillsets and/or differing background on Pangeo topics. This could be a great way to make sure that the less experienced folks stay engaged and have someone they can ask with questions about Pangeo software. This could also help with networking within our community.
If you have any other ideas and want to continue this discussion, please do so!
