Working Workshops

"Working workshops" as opposed to "talking workshops" are meetings where the participants work together (possibly divided into pairs or small teams) to develop new software code or to conduct computational experiments addressing a particular problem. Working workshops are a cross between scientific workshops and coding sprints or hackathons common among open-source software communities.

Here are some suggestions for working workshops for the Madagascar community.

Documentation

The goal of this workshop would be to improve the existing Madagascar documentation and to create new documents (books, papers, user manuals).

Reproducibility

During this workshop, published papers that are not currently reproducible would be made reproducible and included with Madagascar (with permission from the authors). This includes both recent papers and old historical papers.

Data Processing

In the data processing workshop, a particular field dataset is selected for processing by different people and possibly different processing packages. A clear metric is developed for comparing results at different stages of data processing. The goal is to learn about the best data processing practices, to improve the existing tools, and to build reproducible examples.