Open Source Bridge

Excerpt

Description

Open-source projects often struggle with finding contributors and getting off of the ground. Communities, such as Github and PyPi, are host to redundant projects and libraries. In the development space, how do you distinguish your project from others, get people excited to contribute to it, and ultimately create a successful open source project? The answer is to apply user-centered design techniques to the development of your project. User-centered design is usually applied to web applications and products on the front-end of a website, but these techniques can be applied to open source libraries. In user-centered open source projects, your users are those who type `pip install $your_library`.

In this talk, Jackie will illustrate some user-centered techniques that have been used on her own project — Mesa (https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa), along with other successful open source projects. This talk will include a survey of interviews with a focus on successful techniques, along with additional user-centered design techniques that could be leveraged to inspire increased community engagement into your project.

Tags

user-centered design, users

Speaking experience

Speaker

• 

  Jackie Kazil

  • Blog: http://medium.com/notes-from-computational-social-science
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackieKazil

  Biography

  Jackie is a Technical Fellow at Capital One. She is also one of the authors of Mesa, a Python-based agent based modeling library. She loves data, teaching, and coding. She is currently working on her Ph.D in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. She has worked in finance, government, and journalism, with a general focus on public service. She is a co-founder of 18F, was a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and has worked at The Washington Post. She is the co-author of the O’Reilly book, Data Wrangling with Python, and she leads Women Data Scientists DC and PyLadies DC. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and three dogs.

  Sessions

  • * User-centered open source projects
    • Title: User-centered open source projects
    • Track: Culture
    • Room: B304
    • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
    • Excerpt:

      Open-source projects often struggle with finding contributors and getting off of the ground. Lessons learned all point to putting the user first.

    • Speakers: Jackie Kazil
  • * Open sourced tools for Agent Based Modeling
    • Title: Open sourced tools for Agent Based Modeling
    • Track: Practice
    • Room: B301
    • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
    • Excerpt:

      Agent-based modeling is a technique used to explore both complexity and emergence by simulating individual actors and their actions inside of a system. Think of systems such as the traffic in the city or financial markets where one actor can have an effect on the decisions of others until the system’s direction changes its course. During this survey, you will gain an understanding of open source software available in a variety of languages and how to get started quickly.

    • Speakers: Jackie Kazil