scope and goals of common tutorials

[emiliom]

With a relatively narrow focus in mind, I advocate the development of least-common-denominator base tutorials, focused on technical topics, and hosted at a single site. This is closer to the scope of this ICESat-2 template site than to the WaterHackWeek Learning Resources site, though clearly they have a lot of things in common (the latter was developed based on the former).

The proposed focus is on technical tutorials that the hackweeks all address as either pre-event tutorials or base, general materials covered in the first two days. Here is an initial, draft outline of topics:

• Git & GitHub
• Jupyter
• conda
• Numpy
• Pandas
• Xarray
• GeoPandas and mapping
• Visualization could be sprinkled throughout, be a separate tutorial, or both.

Just like most such prior hackweek tutorials, these tutorials should strive to serve the hackweek need for compressed introductions that provide both immediately usable materials and entry points for deeper dives via excellent, up-to-date, vetted external resources. We can learn a lot from, borrow and link to great external resources, specially the Carpentries. These tutorials will also serve as a stand-alone resource for people who land on the site, for their use as they see fit. Some OceanHackWeek organizers have emphasized this under-appreciated and hard-to-find value of our existing tutorials, which could be enhanced through better planning.

My vision is that this would be a living resource that would be created, updated and reviewed by a broader community of the people who would normally create such tutorials for individual hackweeks. Reviews, coordination and progress tracking should take place via GitHub issues and milestones, maybe even using releases. This would be a resource/site that other hackweek web sites link to and refer to granularly, not one that is primarily forked and built on separately by each hackweek.