---
tags: outreachy, galaxy
---
# Galaxy Propeller Project

**Project title**: "Improve our onboarding process of new Galaxy communities"

## Project Skills

See the [other proposal](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OkDycMVxOVGoc9A8UgOyun0jpAOAEmpCJvFMkPhiRg0/edit#bookmark=id.n6mxo8f5hon) for some ideas.

| Skill description | Impact on intern selection | Experience Level |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| Communication skills in English (oral and written) | Required | 4 |
| Git | Preferred | 2 |
| Markdown/Python/R/Python/HTML/CSS, Gridsome, Bootstrap, Vue.js, Jekyll, Javascript Python | Nice to have | 3 |
| Organizing meetings | Nice to have | 3 |
| User experience | Nice to have | 2 |

## System Requirements

All operating systems are welcome! 🌈👩🏽‍💻 This project is rather flexible in terms of device/machine requirements but a good internet connection is required.

You need
- Regular, good access to internet via any device(s) to follow and organise online meetings.
- PC, Mac, or another device with a convenient [text editor](https://coderefinery.github.io/installation/editors/) ([see also](https://carpentries.github.io/workshop-template/#editor)) and Git [installed](https://coderefinery.github.io/git-refresher/01-setup) ([see also here](https://carpentries.github.io/workshop-template/#git))

## Project Description

Galaxy is an open source, open science platform for data integration and analysis that is deployed in hundreds of organizations around the world.  Galaxy is also a community of researchers, students, developers, and infrastructure providers that are doing and enabling data-intensive research.  

Galaxy was originally developed to support genomic data integration and analysis, and that is still the most common domain it is used in. However, the platform itself is domain agnostic, and can be used in any research domain that uses shared data formats and is compute and data intensive. Galaxy is now used in related domains such as proteomics, computational chemistry and molecular modeling, as well as in domains such as climate modelling and natural language processing that are far from life science.

The goal of this project is to ease the on-boarding process for communities that are applying Galaxy in novel domains.

This internship will support Galaxy Community by:
- improving the on-boarding process to welcome and support new communities that show interest in joining Galaxy
- strengthen the contribution of communities that have recently joined the Galaxy Project.

Below are some possible tasks for the intern, depending on her/his interest and technical skills:

- Contribute to the "Galaxy Community Starter Kit" (content editing)
- Starting from our existing documentation (https://galaxyproject.org/), help us to write a document to guide new communities to Galaxy
- Read our documentation, and tell us what you understand from it; what could be improved to welcome new communities?
- Where to start, what to learn, what to communicate to non-bioinformaticians?
- Reach out and introduce newcomers to the Galaxy project and its ecosystem
- Help communities to develop training materials or enhance/review existing ones
- This task could start by reviewing existing community-specific training material (ecology, climate, computational chemistry, imaging, etc.);
- If the intern is interested by a specific domain, then the intern could contribute to training material that are under development.
- Help new communities to design, add new tools or extend/improve existing tools in Galaxy ("optional" require knowledge of XML and coding in Python or R or javascript). Depending on intern's interest and background:
- organize meet-up online with communities to discuss and identify their needs
- design and integrate (interactive) visualization tools (R shiny app, jupyter dashboards, observable notebooks, etc.) for specific communities (ecology, climate, material sciences)
- integrate existing data analysis tools for a newly on-boarded Galaxy domain specific community (ecology, climate, material sciences)
- understand how Galaxy tools are annoted and add annotation to existing domain-specific tools with [EDAM ontology](http://edamontology.org/page).
- Help communities to create showcases using Galaxy workflows and existing Galaxy tools
- use existing galaxy tools to create Galaxy workflows (open and reproducible research).

The intern will have the opportunity to interact with the worldwide Galaxy Community (scientists, developers, administrators).

## Internship Tasks

A concrete internship plan will be developed together with the applicant according to their interests.

The internship project will include:

- Getting familiar with the Galaxy Project and its ecosystem;
- Getting familiar with the main technologies used within Galaxy, with an emphasis on aspects that are of interest to the intern;
- Discuss the final objectives of the intership and whether emphasis will be put on content & review or programming, or a mix of both;
- If the intern is interested, the focus may also include improvements to documentation (via user experience) and/or community engagement (either in general or for a specific community depending on the intern's background);
- Invitation to participate to Galaxy Paper Cuts Day (monthly online event), to the Galaxy Propeller subgroup, and possibily other online community events.

Emphasis will be put on the learning outcomes for the intern, and on networking within the Galaxy community and its broad scientific open source community.

## Intern Benefits

- Working to improve openeness and reproducibility of science in a wide range of domains;
- Extending intern’s technical skills, whether being a complete beginner or an expert, for example in Git, Python, Bash, etc.
- Learning more about open science, reproducible research and FAIR principles.
- Learning and contributing to improve on-boarding process of newcomers for open source projects
- Options suited to intern's interests: focus either on domain specific (ecology, climate, biodiversity, etc.), content, coding, documentation, community engagement, or a chosen mix of those
- Networking within open science and open source communities

## Project Contribution Information

As part of the application process, all applicants must make at least one contribution to be accepted as an intern for this project. Only applicants who make a contribution will be eligible to be accepted as interns.

Everyone can contribute to the Galaxy project! You don't need to be a scientist👩🏽🔬 or a programmer👩🏽💻 to contribute to Galaxy. All contributions are extremely valuable and we highly appreciate them! 🚀

The very first contribution you can do is to follow our training materials and
share the outcomes (Galaxy history) with us:
1. Join the Galaxy Outreachy chat channel: http://gitter.im/galaxyproject/Outreachy, introduce yourself and join in conversations. This is where you can reach project mentors
2. Complete one of these introductory tutorials (https://training.galaxyproject.org/training-material/topics/introduction/) on a public Galaxy instance (e.g. https://usegalaxy.eu/ or https://usegalaxy.org)
- Galaxy 101 for everyone
- A short introduction to Galaxy
- Introduction to Genomics and Galaxy
- How to reproduce published Galaxy analysis
- Creating, Editing and Importing Galaxy Workflows
3. Publish your completed tutorial analysis within Galaxy, and then share that analysis with mentors.
4. Contribute to one of the Galaxy repositories. For information on how to contribute to Galaxy, please start by looking at CONTRIBUTING.md (or CONTRIBUTING.rst). Afterwards you can find good first issues listed among the issues on GitHub. There might be some **good first issues** in:
- https://github.com/galaxyproject/training-material A collection of Galaxy-related training material (look at https://training.galaxyproject.org/training-material/topics/contributing/ to get an overview on how to contribute)
- https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy Galaxy source code for Data intensive science for everyone.
- https://github.com/galaxyecology/tools-ecology
- https://github.com/NordicESMhub/galaxy-tools

Many of the good first issues are suitable for complete newcomers and include possible hints and links for help. Optionally, applicants are welcome to suggest additional ideas for contributions.
We, the mentors, are here to help you, for example to get familiar with Galaxy itself, and with the used technologies (e.g. Git and GitHub if needed).

Coding is completely optional in this project, but possible for applicants that are interested, in Python or XML. Experts can use and extend their skills (for example in Python, Git, javascript, Bash, XML, ...), and complete beginners are invited to learn some of the technologies via a valuable hands-on experience, with help from the mentors. Applicants (and the future intern) have the option to concentrate purely on content, and possibly documentation and/or community engagement.

**Please be aware that we value the quality of applicants' contributions rather than the quantity.**

## How do I work with the Galaxy Community

Outreachy applicants can get help and feedback from both mentors and community members. Community members discuss their contributions in a public chat. Outreachy applicants can often learn from those discussions.
Please introduce yourself on the public project chat:
- Gitter - You can find helpful documentation about this communication tool [here](https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/tree/develop/docs#documentation). Once you join the project's communication channel, the mentors have some additional instructions for you to follow:

All communication and actions are subject to the [Galaxy community's Code of Conduct](https://galaxyproject.org/community/coc/). In addition, all interactions between Outreachy applicants, interns, mentors, etc. are subject to the Outreachy's Code of Conduct (you can find it in [your account](https://www.outreachy.org/account/)).
[Follow this link](http://gitter.im/galaxyproject/Outreachy) to join the Galaxy Outreachy chat channel.
- Please join using a GitHub account. You can keep your GitHub account anonymous if you wish so 🐱👤 ([hints here](https://coderefinery.github.io/git-refresher/01-setup/#setting-up-a-github-account))
- You are welcome to say hi on the channel 👋🏽 and introduce yourself if you wish (but this is not mandatory)

Outreachy mentors will often be in the community public chat.

## Mentor profile

### Anne Fouilloux
Personal info:

- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Timezone: Europe/Oslo
- Location: Norway
- Contact info:

- Personal email: "Anne Fouilloux" <[e-mail]>
- Please try to contact the mentor on public community channels as much as possible. Often other mentors for the project can answer your question or point you in the right direction to get help. They may be able to answer your question faster than emailing your mentor directly. While it's fine to contact mentors privately with doubts, Outreachy applicants and interns will need to learn how to ask questions and work publicly through the community communication channels.
- Username on community forums or chat: annefou
- GitHub profile: https://github.com/annefou
- Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/AnneFouilloux

Each Outreachy mentor will have a different mentorship style, a preferred way to contact them, and different ways of working with interns. Anne Fouilloux's mentorship style is: Video chat, pair programming and discussio via slack and/or hackMD.

Outreachy mentors are required to be experienced contributors to free and open source software (FOSS). Anne Fouilloux has contributed to this team for 0-2 months. This mentor has made the following contributions to this team or other FOSS communities: I haven't made any contributions yet.

You'll be able to find this mentor on the FOSS community communication channel under the username: annefou