Project Guidelines

During Geohackweek we will be facilitating open hacking sessions during most of the afternoons. The purpose of these sessions is for you to gain hands-on experience in hacking on a small, well-defined geospatial problem.

If the concept of “hacking” is foreign to you, you are not alone! The term is relatively new and there are various interpretations of what it entails. To us, hacking is simply a period of focused, highly collaborative computer programming, in which we create conditions for rapid absorption of new ideas and methods. Visit our hacking central page for more specific information on this approach.

We will structure our hackathon sessions around specific scientific problems. Each problem will have a conventional scientific layout (e.g. introduction, methods, expected results). For each project we will have a brief proposal posted on GitHub. Some examples are here. We then will guide you to use that framework for narrowing in on specific computational tools or methods. You can work individually, but we encourage you to forming small teams (2-5 people) around a specific scientific problem.

We know some of you already have some project ideas in mind. If so, these few weeks before the event are a great opportunity to begin preparing datasets and creating an outline of proposed work. For those of you without an existing project, there is no need to worry. Our goal is to use existing projects as templates that you can use for designing your own project. You may consider joining other projects as they emerge on our hackpad page, or you can wait until you arrive to get direct advice on your own hacking idea.

Remember: our goal is to give you hands-on experience applying what you learn during the Geohackweek tutorials to specific scientific problems. We are not looking for any scientific breakthroughs at the end of the week! It is completely fine to work on a simplified or preliminary dataset, as long as you are gaining experience with the tools.