The Data Curation Network hosted a Virtual All Hands Meeting on July 13-17th, 2020. We held the very first “Primer Hackathon” as part of this virtual experience. Our intention was to update the primers created by the cohort from the first IMLS-funded Specialized Data Curation Workshop, which was co-located at the 2018 DLF Forum October 17-18 of that year.

We opened the All Hands Meeting with this Hackathon event. In addition to members of the DCN, we invited primer authors from all three of our Specialized Data Curation Workshops to attend. Participants were given a brief orientation of primer scope and how to create and style pull requests to build on existing primers. This information can also be found in our contributor’s guide located in our Github repository. Next, they formed six working groups that met independently during the week to develop recommended updates and the pull requests necessary to make these changes to the primers.

The Primer Hackathon working groups examined the following resources:

It was a very successful event! We had 30 participants, three substantial pull requests and many more ideas and new material to consider for future updates.

We also worked out a new process for updating primers as part of this activity:

  • Create README files for each of the primers. 
  • Authors suggesting updates are included as “contributors” in the README with details of updates and other contributions. We will also indicate these contributions were made as part of the 2020 DCN AHM Primer Hackathon.
  • New contributions do not affect the original authorship of a primer or change its citation, but we do want to make sure everyone’s contribution is recorded and recognized. 
  • The primer authors are contacted with each pull request and given a period of two weeks to comment before the request is accepted.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the event this year! We plan on making this an annual event, so next year we will focus on updates for the primers created by the groups from the second workshop that was held at Johns Hopkins University April 17-18, 2019. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to make a pull request for any fully published primer on their own. Please check out what resources are available in our repository: https://github.com/DataCurationNetwork/data-primers!