Running your own Hacky Hour

By Damien Irving.

If you’ve ever run a workshop or short-course on a particular digital research skill, you’ll be familiar with this post-workshop conundrum: how can I provide useful, relevant and ongoing assistance to my attendees? Even if workshop participants are keen to continue learning, it can be very difficult to (a) get them to come forward and ask questions, and (b) have the discipline specific expertise on hand to actually answer those questions. Like many other prominant thinkers in educational psychology, our apporach to this problem was to come up with a silly pun (“Hacky Hour”) and then base our answer around that. In the wake of ResBaz 2015 a number of people have asked about tips and advice for starting a Hacky Hour at their home institution, so here’s our best attempt at wisdom and sage advice…

The first thing to say is that Hacky Hour is more than just a weekly help desk located at a bar on campus (3-4pm every Thursday, Tsubu Bar). Some weeks we get enough genuine questions to fill an hour, but you’d have to be part of a pretty extraordinary community to have enough questions to keep you going all year. To fill the void, we’ve worked hard to make sure Hacky Hour is the focal point of our networking activities. If I’m meeting up with the President of the Ecology Student Society to chat about running a Software Carpentry workshop, for instance, I’ll schedule that meeting for Hacky Hour. Other people in our local ResBaz community start to do the same, and all of a sudden Hacky Hour becomes a hive of people with lots of different digital research skills and interests. It can be a little chaotic (lots of meetings going on all over the place), but the diversity of attendees is fantastic for answering the wide variety of questions we get from previous workshop attendees.

Beyond just being a place to have your specific programming questions answered, Hacky Hour has become the open science and digital technology meetup on campus. Most of our “regulars” like to keep up-to-date with the latest tools and research best practices, and have found that Hacky Hour is a place to be part of that conversation. As a consequence, people come down who have something to share in front of such an audience. We’ve had a Masters student pitch his idea for a cloud-based hosting service for computer models, a cloud computing educator tested his new lesson materials on our regulars and next week an IT guru is going to come down and disassemble an old server in front of us all.

In short, if you want to your Hacky Hour to thrive, think of it as a community, not just a help desk.