Hello Fourie, Terri, Michelle, and Peter, (and the
Galaxy training community)
The Galaxy training community has discussed what we would
like to see in GOBLET in the coming year. I initially floated
several ideas on the galaxy-training mailing list, and these
were then modified and extended by the community.
This email lists those items and includes some suggestions
for implementing them.
Fourie, we're handing these to you for presenting to the
larger group. Peter van Heusden of SANBI will also be in
attendance and can also speak from his experience within the
Galaxy community.
Many thanks for Hans-Rudolf Hotz and Björn Grüning for
starting this conversation and contributing to it, and to
Fourie for agreeing to represent GTN.
If anyone has anything to add to the items below, please do
so in the next day.
Dave C on behalf of the Galaxy Training Network
Five items we would like to see discussed are:
1. Enable/Host online discussion about bioinformatics
training.
We'd like GOBLET to host a
mailing list or online forum for discussion of
bioinformatics training issues. GOBLET has an announcements
mailing list, but it would be a huge win if GOBLET
hosted the place to discuss bioinformatics training
issues. We argue this place list/forum be open to
anyone, not just GOBLET members.
Galaxy has had significant
success with a Biostar based forum (but a mailing list
would be great too.)
2. Either start sending a
regular newsletter, or stop saying we have one.
Our preference is to start sending a regular newsletter,
but that is effort and the payoff is uncertain. Having a
newsletter does increase GOBLET's visibility and it also
great for newcomers to see what is going on. (And having a
better welcome for new GOBLETeers is one of our goals.)
I prepare the monthly
Galaxy Newsletters and this takes a little over a day of
my time, every month. (But when I suggested to the
Galaxy training list, that this might not be worth my
time, I got pushback that it was worth my time.)
3. Should GOBLET offer a
bioinformatics trainer certification?
GTN is in favor of a GOBLET Trainer badge as a way of
both promoting GOBLET and as a way of saying "I've
participated in GOBLET training" or "I'm GOBLET
certified."
Perhaps attendees at the just finished best practices
workshop would be the first recipients?
4. Make it easier to
publish, share, and refine training material.
(I'm channeling Björn Grüning here. Björn, please correct
me if I go astray.)
Software and Data Carpentry's model for training material
is to use GitHub for version control, and to use Github's
branching and merging capabilities to enable community
editing of that training material.
Right now GOBLET's (and GTN's) training material
sharing is purely upload/download. It might be worth
considering taking a hard look at how Carpentry does this
and then support a similar model. Embracing this might
lead to an explosion of collaboration on training
material. It has been very successful for Software
Carpentry
The danger here is that the upload/download model is
simple to use and easy to implement, and a Github based
system would be a lot of work up front, and might not ever
catch on.
5. Shared Training
Datasets are Precious!
(Also channeling Björn here, although he never used the
word "precious.")
Given the difficulty and time required to create good
datasets for training, it might be worthwhile for GOBLET
to create a central repository for training datasets.
This increases their visibility and usefulness, and also
increases the visibility of the training dataset creators.
Right now people can upload datasets of up to 50MB,
which is good, but it would be great if there were some
way to identify just training datasets, or training
resources that include datasets.
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