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TRANSFORM 2022

TRANSFORM 2022

Last week the Software Underground hosted the latest edition of TRANSFORM, its annual festival of digital subsurface stuff. This year we had a packed schedule, including:

  • Folks sprinting on various software projects at the weekend.

  • 13 live hands-on tutorials on a wide range of topics.

  • Birds of a feather meet-ups to discuss the future of scientific virtual meetings.

  • Eight lightning talks on topics from sealice to web apps to scholarly communication.

  • The Annual General Meeting of the Software Underground organization.

All this was stitched together by the Slack chat, as usual. You can catch up on what you missed in the #t22-general channel. Our Slack is free to join and open to anyone.

The tutorials

Here’s a list of the tutorials, which were very high quality this year. All of them were 90 minutes to 2 hours long, and all are supported by fully open-source software and open-access materials. How awesome is that?

  • Getting started in Python, by Robert Leckenby (Agile).

  • GSTools, a toolbox for geostatistical modeling in Python, by Sebastian Müller (UFZ, Leipzig).

  • What is Markov chain Monte Carlo? By Miguel de la Varga (Terranigma).

  • Mandyoc, a finite element simulator for the mantle, by Agustina Pesce et al.

  • Machine learning models for geoscience, by Tom Ostersen (Datarock).

  • From Zero to Devito (geophysical modeling & inversion), by Rhodri Nelson (Devito).

  • Publishing your first Python package, by Matt Hall (Agile).

  • PyGIMLi (geophysical modeling & inversion), by Florian Wagner et al. (RWTH).

  • OccamyPy, an object-oriented optimization framework for large-scale inverse problems, by Francesco Picetti & Ettore Biondi (Stanford).

  • A geophysical tour of mid-ocean ridges, by Leonardo Uieda (U of Liverpool).

  • Self-supervised noise suppression, by Claire Birnie & Sixiu Liu (KAUST).

  • Julia for geoscience, by Francis Yin (Georgia Tech).

  • PyLops (geophysical modeling & inversion), by Matteo Ravasi et al. (KAUST).

If any of those sound good to you, and I hope they all do, check them out in this YouTube Playlist.

The lightning talks

As always, the lightning talks were a lot of fun. Check out the Description in this video for the full list of chapters:

That’s it for 2022. Hope to see you at TRANSFORM next year!

TRANSFORM 2021 is coming

TRANSFORM 2021 is coming

Mark your calendar: 16 to 23 April. The virtual conference for the digital subsurface is returning, a little earlier this year, so that it can incorporate the Annual General Meeting of the Software Underground on Wednesday 21 April. It will be a rather momentous occasion, because it is the first AGM since we incorporated the society last spring. Please come and help us celebrate — and determine the future of this organization!

If you just want to get to the sign-up, click the button. If you want to learn more, read on!

As last year, the conference will focus on expanding the horizons of our members. This means helping people acquire new skills, meet new people, and find out about new problems in applied subsurface science and engineering. Here’s how the schedule looks from a very high level:

An outline schedule for TRANSFORM 2021. We will publish the timing of these blocks in the near future. For now, it’s just a guide and is subject to change.

An outline schedule for TRANSFORM 2021. We will publish the timing of these blocks in the near future. For now, it’s just a guide and is subject to change.

You may not have encountered some of these components before, especially not in a virtual world, so here’s a bit more detail:

  • Hackathon — Teams of up to about 8 collaborate on all sorts of projects, from Python libraries to open data to reproducing papers. Check out the report part one and part two from last year.

  • Tutorials — Get started on a new tool or skill! These 2-hour sessions will be 100% hands-on and can be consumed live or at your own pace. Check out the TRANSFORM 20 lessons.

  • Unconference — This is the bit of the conference where we tackle the big questions. We’ll announce these components as we get closer to the event.

  • Birds of a Feather (BOF) — Software Underground aims to be a platform to elevate other communities and projects. BOFs are where people with big ideas in common flock together.

  • Annual General Meeting (AGM) — The Underground incorporated in April. Our first AGM will see our first elections and voting on our constitution. You’re invited, please sign up here.

  • Lightning talks — Five minutes is not long, but it’s long enough to get a crowd stoked about your latest project or keenest insight! Watch the lightning bolts from Day 1 and Day 2 last year.

TRANSFORM 2020 brought over 700 digital subsurface professionals together to talk and learn about their craft. The virtual format means anyone can join us, wherever they are. And our Pay What You Like fee means that cost is never an issue. If you are planning to join us, sign up now and we’ll make sure you’re kept up to date.

💡 If your organization would like to sponsor TRANSFORM 2021 and grow the learning opportunities for scientists in our field, we’d love to hear from you! Find out more about supporting our programs.

Tech for online meetings

Tech for online meetings

In pulling TRANSFORM 2020 together, the organizers (Filippo Broggini, Brendon Hall, Rob LEckenby, Victoria-Lou Devezes, and me) looked at a lot of technology options. I thought I’d share the stuff we used here, in case you’re wondering what you need for a full-on virtual conference. But first, I’ll try to give a high-level description of the sorts of events we hosted at the conference.

We had three main types of session to support:

Tutorials

We hosted 14 three-hour tutorials, which mostly involved one or two instructors and 10 to 150 learners. Behind the scenes, there was one ‘livestream host’, who was essentially like a TV director.

The instructors were in a Zoom meeting with the host, sharing screens with them. The host captured their Zoom meeting with OBS Studio, and streamed it to YouTube Live. All of the participants watched via YouTube, and the live stream is also preserved there.

Lightning talks

There were two lightning talk sessions, each two hours long. The set-up was similar to the tutorials, except that there were more presenters — 12 per session. They came into the Zoom just before their allotted time and left right after, so there were never more than 3 or 4 people in the Zoom at once.

Unsessions

These were not streamed to YouTube, so we were able to host everyone in one big Zoom meeting. (I had a Large Meeting add-on ‘just in case’ but we didn’t need it in the end; the most we had was 97 people.) This made the session susceptible to Zoom-bombing, so we were careful about where we shared the link, and we used a waiting room — with Victoria ‘on the door’ to let people in promptly.

The unsession format, which I’ll write about another time, relied heavily on Zoom’s breakout rooms. We also used GroupMap a lot — it’s a great tool for capturing ideas from a group of people.

Here are the tools we used:

  • Slack — the heart and mind of the Software Underground already lives in our Slack workspace. To make the multiple conversations more manageable, we made channels for all of the sessions and hackathon projects, and this worked well. During the week, 700 active members exchanged about 19,000 messages, about 50% of which were in private chat.

  • Zoom — the Covid-famous video conferencing tool. It worked well for us for the host–presenter meetings in the tutorials and lightning talks, and as the main room for the unsessions and hackathon presentations. We were very worried about Zoom-bombing, and were perhaps over-cautious (some legit people found it hard to enter sessions).

  • YouTube — for the tutorials and lightning talks, we streamed the host–presenter Zoom to YouTube for participants to consume. This has a few big advantages: it eliminates the Zoom-bombing risk, participants can pause and rewind the live stream, and videos go straight to YouTube afterwards. And it’s free!

  • OBS Studio — a fantastic open-source tool that lets you combine images, video feeds, and audio sources into a single stream, which you can send to YouTube (or Twitch or any other streaming service). This is how we streamed the Zoom sessions. It does have a learning curve though, and certainly requires an off-screen ‘director’ to manage it all — and several practice sessions to get the workflow down.

  • GitHub — is indispensable for code-sharing and source control. I think all of the hackathon projects hosted their repos on GitHub. The tool is not intuitive for new programmers though, and wrangling git and GitHub is one of the most requested help topics in our hackathons and courses.

  • GroupMap — a wonderful tool for collaborative brainstorming. It definitely needs a couple of hours to get the hang of what it can do, but for me this was the standout discovery of the event. Its best feature is that you can set up a workflow, like Survey > Brainstorm > Vote > Results and then guide the group through the stages, live.

  • Sched and Eventbrite — for event registration. Both of these tools have their high-points — Sched is really nice for building the event schedule — but the registration process for the event was a bit of a hairball and while these tools are supposed to play nicely together, I never felt comfortable with either of them.

  • Printful — a T-shirt (and other merch) vendor. The advantages are that they print ‘direct to garment’ (i.e. there’s no setup, they just print a shirt when you order one), they take care of fulfilment, and their system works seamlessly (sort of) with Squarespace, our website host. But the system is not that easy to use and I’m thinking of switching to Teespring.

  • We also used a bit of hardware. Microphones were hard to find during the Covid-19 crisis, but we sent Blue Yeti Nano or Blue Snowball Ice USB mics to our instructors. The Yeti Nano is especially nice, with two pickup patterns and a hardware mute button.

  • Other… The organizers and the participants used other tools during the conference, including: Mentimeter, Google Maps, Miro, and HackMD, plus of course Twitter and other social media.

I don’t think I appreciated it before the event — looking back, it seems obvious — but technology is completely intertwined with an online-first event. Sometimes the limitations of the tool force you to adapt; other times, the tool can enable new things you hadn’t thought of. It’s going to be interesting watching these remote collaboration tools evolve over the coming months and years. And even more interesting thinking about what kinds of meetings we can have with them!

If you have a favourite collaboration tool I haven’t mentioned here, or you’ve been in a meeting that did something different, I’d love to hear about it.

TRANSFORM 2020

TRANSFORM 2020

We did it! Surrounded by sawdust from the recent incorporation of the Software Underground as a non-profit, we emerged from the wreckage of the Covid-cancelled hackathons in Amsterdam and Houston. Not just alive, but full of vigour and hope for the new world of online scientific events. And everything — well, almost everything — worked out.

Before saying anything more, a huge Thank You to our sponsors for making our events possible. And a special mention for DELL Technologies, who have been an unflinching supporter of the Software Underground and Agile’s community events for years.

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The audacious plan

Initially, our purpose was to move the cancelled hackathons online. So from 6 June to 14 June, Filippo Broggini and others hosted a 9-day hackathon. This worked so fantastically well that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it was the most successful subsurface hackathon ever. But I’ll leave Filippo to tell you all about it in the coming days.

Our next thought was, “Let’s help people skill up and add some tutorials.” So Brendon Hall, Rob Leckenby and I hosted 14 completely free and fully interactive two- to three-hour tutorials during the week. All of these streamed direct to YouTube and will stay there forever (see links below).

Then we added two group-participation unsessions — one on geoscience careers, and one on open source tools — and two sets of lightning talks from anyone who wanted to give one. All of this while several of the hackathon projects were still in full swing. It was a hectic week!

The tutorials

Fair warning: there is about 37 hours of first-rate instruction in digital earth science here. The first two are totally approachable for beginners, (and there's no shortage of people in the Software Underground who can help you get started!) so there's truly something for everyone.

A huge Thank You to all of the instrutors, who not only gave freely of their time and insight, but also are all using open code and open data. No paywalls here!

Lightning talks

I'm so glad we added these 24 five-minute talks to the schedule. It was no trouble filling them — people signed themselves up. Every single talk was enlightening in some way, and these sessions were both really fun to be in. Thank you to everyone who took part!

Here's Andrea Balza Morales talking about the GeoLatinas Coding Group, which meets on Zoom twice a week:

Screenshot from 2020-06-17 16-02-08.png

The unsessions

An 'unsession' is a scientific meeting session, but without talks. Instead, we have a group discussion — but not the painful sort where you pass a mic around. We have a discussion that involves every scientist in the room. Since holding the first geoscience 'unsession' at CSEG in 2013, we've continued to evolve and adapt the methodology, but Monday was the first time I've tried to do one online.

I'll write more about these unsessions in the coming days, but here's a high-level description of what happened:

  • Unsession 1: What is good career advice in 2020? Around 95 people showed up to the start of this conversation about jobs and skills. We shared our career paths so far, and groups chatted about the best — and worst! — job-related advice they'd received. Finally we identified and ranked ideas for tools the Software Underground could build to help us all help each other find work we love.

  • Unsession 2: What open tools are needed now? The second session had around 55 people in conversation around open source tools. We talked about our favourite pieces of software, and what subsurface-flavoured versions might look like. And we heard how 4 current projects are trying to fill gaps in our current workflows, for example in seismic data management, and between geological models and GIS.

Here's where participants in the unsessions on Monday (blue) and Tuesday (red) were located:

unsession_map.png
strike-for-black-lives.png

On Wednesday we cleared our schedule in support of the #ShutDownSTEM and #strike4blacklives activism. We did this to help shine a light on the fact that black and racialized people everywhere are systematically disadvantaged in academia, industry, government, and all avenues in which STEM is practiced. In place of our schedule,we individually used the day to educate ourselves and listen to black voices in STEM. We must do better.

If you have not already done so, I urge you to read and sign this petition, which seeks to directly address the diversity problem we face today in geoscience.

If you took part in Transform 2020 — we thank you for your participation, and hope you learned something and will tell your friends and return next time.

We’ll write more soon about Transform 2020, which I hope and believe will have ramifications for how this community collaborates in the future. So stay tuned for that.