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How to think about projects
The goal of this hackathon is to expand the capacity for scientific and educational uses of OpenTree resources through programmatic access to OpenTree’s reference taxonomy, source trees, and synthetic tree. Tools that use web services and follow open standards can become part of a network of interoperable evolutionary resources that will disseminate phylogenetic knowledge more widely and more rapidly, accelerating the pace of science and benefiting a larger community.
- has goals that are clear, achievable, and in scope (see scoping below)`
- aims to generate tangible outcomes (see deliverables below) `
- advances the goals of the hackathon`
- takes advantage of the skills in the team`
All teams must develop their products publicly with open-source, open data licenses
Past hackathons have taught us that after the hackathon ends and the team members disperse and go back to their day jobs, it is very unlikely that any further work will be done. So, plan a project that begins and ends this week, with all of its products in their final state on Friday at 1:00 or so.
Based on the stated goal above, our focus is on building capacity and solving technical problems, rather than doing scientific research. Analyzing trees to resolve the relationships of mammalian orders is out of scope, but building a tool that allows users to identify gaps and conflicts in the ToL is in scope. Interoperability of tools and data is an important theme, and often relies on using existing standards. Building a new tool to visualize phylogenies is not a challenge of interoperability or dissemination, and is out of scope. However, modifying a visualization tool by adding a query interface to get trees directly from OpenTree is in scope.
The most common deliverable is working code. Often this code represents a demo or prototype, but in some cases it is part of the production code of a library or tool. Hackathon teams can produce deliverables other than computer code, such as
- screencasts or how-to docs with code snippets and practical examples
- draft standards (e.g., a standard for annotating trees)
- materials to support classroom exercises (e.g., exercises using ToL resources)
- a technical assessment (e.g., of the scope and quality of available phyloinformatics web services)