Running regular tutorials independent of events

[andersy005]

The Dask team has been running regular, community, 90 minutes tutorials since June 2020, and these tutorials appear to have worked well (see dask/community#57). @mrocklin and @jacobtomlinson put together a nice guide on how to run such tutorials: https://blog.dask.org/2020/08/21/running-tutorials.

I am interested in running similar, regular xarray online tutorials. @martindurant and @dcherian generously offered to help out. We are planning on having the first session on Friday October 2nd. As we start getting the content ready, I am wondering if folks who delivered the most recent tutorial at SciPy 2020 would be interested in sharing the feedback they received? We could use the feedback to re-structure the existing tutorial materials so as to cater to different audiences for different tutorial sessions.

[andersy005]

Also, the existing tutorial materials are geo-science centered, and I am wondering if folks have thoughts on whether it would be useful to have contents that cover other use cases for non-geosciences folks using xarray?

[martindurant]

(tagging other scipy 2020 contributors: @jhamman @rabernat @shoyer )

[dcherian]

, the existing tutorial materials are geo-science centered, and I am wondering if folks have thoughts on whether it would be useful to have contents that cover other use cases for non-geosciences folks using xarra

@TomNicholas might has some plasma physics notebooks lying around.

One goal of our CZI funded work is for @rabernat to work on documentation; in part to bring in examples from other domains so everyone is in favour of doing this!

[andersy005]

I created an event on eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/free-online-tutorial-for-xarray-tickets-122003528839. We could use some help from folks with access to @xarray_dev (Cc @jhamman) and @dask_dev (Cc @mrocklin) twitter accounts to get the word out.

The tutorial is scheduled Oct 2, 11am - 1pm (Eastern Time). @martindurant and @dcherian, let me know if this is too early for you, and we can shift it back an hour or two...

[rabernat]

This is great! Let's also publicize via Pangeo channels.

[andersy005]

This is great! Let's also publicize via Pangeo channels.

👍 Indeed... Forgot Pangeo has presence on twitter...

[martindurant]

The time is fine with me. I tweeted it from dask's account.

[dcherian]

Retweeted from xarray's account.

[andersy005]

A big thank you to everyone who helped spread the word! The event sold out in less than 24 hours... I had set the maximum capacity to 150 seats...

[jhamman]

Whoops! I just got around to tweeting the announcement from the Xarray account. Should I take it down? Or are you thinking of increasing the maximum capacity?

[martindurant]

Sounds like the event will need some repeats. With dask, we found that we exhausted the enthusiasm (for now) in a given timezone after a few events at the same time of day.

[andersy005]

Should I take it down? Or are you thinking of increasing the maximum capacity?

Let's keep it.. I just bumped it to 200. It's likely that some folks won't show up.

Sounds like the event will need some repeats. With dask, we found that we exhausted the enthusiasm (for now) in a given timezone after a few events at the same time of day.

👍

[martindurant]

It's likely that some folks won't show up.

We consistently saw about 50% attendance. That figure could probably be higher, depending on how many reminder emails we got eventbrite to send.

[mrocklin]

The limiting factor on attendance tends to be the chat activity. We also usually post the session on youtube afterwards for async viewers. I recommend keeping the limit at the 150-200 level (you'll get 75-100 attendees) and then re-running the tutorial in one month.

…

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 11:21 AM Martin Durant ***@***.***> wrote: It's likely that some folks won't show up. We consistently saw about 50% attendance. That figure could probably be higher, depending on how many reminder emails we got eventbrite to send. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#36 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AACKZTHXAD7NUTOB2HP7BG3SHDTKFANCNFSM4RN4ZBDQ> .

[andersy005]

Cross posting: dask/dask-blog#72 (comment) here

Last friday's tutorial went so smooth! We had between 80-100 attendees (from 200 registrants).

• I just sent out a post-event survey, and hopefully we will get some feedback from attendees in the coming days.
• A recording of the tutorial is available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/a339Q5F48UQ

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this!