This is what success looks like

By Damien Irving.

One of the major goals of the ResBaz movement is to facilitate the formation of self-sufficient communities around common digital research tools. It would be impossible for a single institution to provide a help desk for the myriad of different tools and software libraries out there, so instead we want to help researchers get together and help themselves. We want all the astronomers to get together and help each other with AstroPy (a popular Python library), all the humanities and social scientists to get together and help each other with NLTK, all the people from lots of different disciplines who have a common interest in mapping to help each other with CartoDB and TileMill, etc, etc. With that goal in mind, the Software Carpentry workshop hosted by COMBINE (a student-run organisation for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics) last week was a major milestone.     

The origins of the COMBINE workshop go back to November 2013, at the first ever ResBaz Software Carpentry workshop. A few students from the COMBINE community came to that event and liked what they saw, so we got chatting and agreed to co-host a couple of workshops in 2014 (see here and here). Myself and Scott Ritchie did most of the teaching at those workshops, while COMBINE did all the advertising and provided most of the helpers. Inspired by our teaching prowess (or perhaps sick of listening to us and thinking they could do a better job!), a bunch of those helpers came along to our Software Carpentry instructor training course in February 2015. As newly accredited instructors, they then got together and hosted the workshop last week without any assistance from us whatsoever.

There’s still a long way to go before we make ourselves completely redundant, but this is an exciting step in that direction. Congratulations to the COMBINE crew on a great workshop and for all your efforts over the last couple of years in helping lift the computational competency of the Australian bioinformatics community!