We provide a series of in-person Zoom meetings and video trainings to assist hackweek organizers to develop skills necessary to support a hackweek.

Below is the tentative schedule for our 2024 NASA Earth Science Hackweek (exact dates to be determined):

All-Hands Orientation

This brief (30 minute) meeting will provide an overview of why we believe it is important to attend our planning and training calls. We will talk about our goals to professionalize short-format hackweek training and how you can be recognized for the effort you are dedicating to this event. We will also map out our overall schedule and connect you with various resources.

Following this group kickoff we will be offering specific training for 3 tracks of activity (tutorials, projects and helpers), as well as additional training applicable to everyone.

Tutorial Team

The tutorial team consists of everyone contributing to the design, scheduling and content of the hackweek tutorials. We’ll start with a Kickoff Meeting (early May) where we will get to know each other and create an outline of tutorial themes as they relate to the overall goal of each event. We will also decide on specific tutorial titles, duration, theme, and identify tutorial leaders. Our Tutorial Design Training (late May) will teach you how to craft learning outcomes and create interactive learning content. We’ll then leave you to work on creating content, with one 30 minute-Consultation with a member of our education team. In mid-July we will reconvene as a full group to Share Tutorial Content, looking for areas of overlap, complementarity and ways to further streamline the collective tutorial experience. After more tutorial editing we will offer the chance for a Tutorial Dry Run (early August) where you can practice some of your tutorial and get feedback from your peers.

Project Team

The project team includes everyone leading and/or contributing to creation of hackweek project content. We will gather together in for a Kickoff Meeting (mid-May) to get to know each other and document the collective knowledge and expertise of our teams. During this meeting we will review our list of specific projects, identify project leads and get clear on our various roles. We will then give the teams several weeks to create project outlines and content. During that time there will be a required 30 minute 1×1 Consultation with our project coordination team. In mid-July we will offer our Project Teamwork Training to guide you in best practices for identifying tasks, following software design principles and collaborating in small teams. Following this we will gather again to Share Project Content (late July) across all teams, looking for common themes that might inform the need for other tutorials or learning content.

Helper Team

Helpers include everyone offering their knowledge and skills to support the learning of hackweek participants in tutorial and projects. We will gather the helper team for a Kickoff Meeting (early June) where we will get to know each other and what we each hope to bring to the event. We will orient everyone to various helper roles and describe our mechanism for linking each helper to specific activites during the week. Over the summer we will informally connect with helpers to invite them into specific activities as the work of the tutorial and project teams evolve.

Training for Everyone

The Technical Infrastructure training (mid June) will orient everyone to our shared computational tools designed to support learning and collaboration. We’ll learn how to use Git and GitHub to create tutorial and project content, and help people with storing datasets for participants to access.

The training on Positive Learning Culture (early August) will explore specific ways we can create a psychologically safe and highly collaborative, open environment in which participants of the hackweek can thrive.