Software WG meeting: Jan 10, 2022

Agenda: https://github.com/OCNS/SoftwareWG/issues/56

Attendees

• Ankur Sinha (Silver Lab, UCL)
• Shailesh Appukuttan (NeuroPSI, CNRS)
• Thomas Nowotny (University of Sussex)
• Joe Graham (SUNY Downstate)
• James Knight (University of Sussex)
• Marcel Stimberg (Sorbonne University, Paris, France)

Meeting logs

How we can improve participation for our events

• Shailesh/Thomas N to poke the OCNS Board Social Media chair to share our sessions on OCNS accounts.
• Balance user and developer related sessions.

Survey to gauge audience interest and topics

• Needs to be short (2-3 minutes)
• Include list of tutorials we can deliver
• Include text box to allow people to make other suggestions
• Shailesh to make survey form
• Shailesh/Ankur send out to mailing lists

apart from our regular dev talks, what other events to plan this coming year

• more user focussed events
• CNS tutorials

Notes/comments/discussion on the software citation principles dev session

• Credit in software dev not as clear/established as in papers
• Could ask to cite both paper and exact version (in methods)
• Zenodo does give you a DOI for "all versions", but just links to latest
• "Citation.cff" on GitHub allows you to define multiple citations (preferred), needs to be done manually
• Software Heritage IDs: point to exact snapshots; more for archival and permanent URLs. For example: https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory/?origin_url=https://github.com/NeuralEnsemble/libNeuroML
• Float idea of Software Citation talk as part of primary conference program to OCNS Board

Preparation for CNS 2022

• Prefer satellite tutorials before the conference (at least more than 2 days before so that folks aren't travelling)
• try and keep it very very cheap to encourage student participation: preferably have different registration rates
• can disconnect from Sched etc. that are used for the main meeting if necessary

Making the working group more diverse

• Reach out to people who may be able to help us get started

  • NEST folks
  • Sharon Crook

• Other links:

  • https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/26999/women-in-computational-neuroscience
  • https://www.alba.network/ - Srikanth Ramaswamy (new Board member) is invovled in this, could loop them in.
  • https://anneslist.net/

• Outreachy: https://www.outreachy.org/

  • Example (NeuroFedora): https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-december-2021-internship-round/communities/fedora/#extend-and-improve-neurofedoras-user-consumable-ar
  • Usually hard because of dual requirements of technical and scientific knowledge
  • May work with less technical tasks: infra/documentation/etc.

Jitsi

Worked well, agree to continue using it for future meetings.