CCT Data Science Team Accepted to Open Life Science Program
We are excited to announce that our group was accepted to the inaugural Open Life Science (OLS) program recently. This program is derived from the Mozilla Open Leaders program, and our team’s cohort will begin a 15 week internship in January of 2020. The purpose of OLS is to improve open science practices and communities by matching mentees with experienced mentors.
Our group creates and provides open data and software for agricultural research, and we are continually improving the accessibility and usefulness of these products for the community. Our target community is researchers and engineers across diverse domains who are improving agricultural systems. We contribute by providing open software and data, including the TERRA REF project for high resolution crop traits, PEcAn for crop modeling, and the Drone Processing Pipeline for the use of drones to study crops and agricultural systems.
Our project with OLS will focus on a challenge that many open source organizations struggle with: enabling community use of our products through good documentation. The scientific software and data that our group produces are dense and ever changing. In order to help community members get started with and use these products, we need to provide consistent, user-friendly, up-to-date documentation for these. Open science goes beyond making software and data available, as these need to also be useful and accessible to the community.
Our OLS project is described in the proposal. From our group, Emily, Jorge, David, and Kristina are participating. We plan to each work on smaller sub-projects with specific aims for improving documentation. For example, we want to make first time contributions easier and to assess gaps in documentation from the user perspective. We are looking forward to working with a mentor who can help us identify and implement best practices in our work, and will share our findings with the broader community of open researchers.
We are excited and grateful to be part of the first cohort for OLS. Through this program, we will gain insights on how to improve documentation for scientific software and open agricultural datasets, thereby growing and becoming more involved in our community. Tune in after the new year for regular updates on our progress!