What is a Do-a-Thon?
A do-a-thon is a short collaboration where people from different perspectives and skill sets work together on challenges, projects, or to learn something new. For OpenCon Cascadia’s do-a-thon, we’ll be focusing on activities that seek to make knowledge, community, and action more open, inclusive, and accessible.
Our Do-a-Thon has three key goals:
1. Focus on doing. You don’t need to be an expert to propose an activity or participate. Use this time to work on a new idea, find collaborators, teach or attend a workshop — you decide! Get creative with the approaches you take to create more open systems for sharing information, taking action, and building open, inclusive, accessible communities.
2. Explore problems thoughtfully. We’re asking participants to think about the hurdles and perspectives that contextualize an issue before jumping to a solution.
3. Encourage collaboration across skill sets. Build and learn together. Amazing things can happen when people with a wide variety of skills and experience come together. We want policy makers to talk to educators, librarians to work with web developers, designers to collaborate with researchers, and everything in between. We’re excited to see what happens when folks across disciplines pool their knowledge together to imagine something big.
Ideas/Projects to Join:
Symposia: Symposia will be an open platform to help users initiate and participate in crowdsourced debates, analyses, reviews, and experiments. Looking for people to help with: coding, fundraising, graphic design Themes: #OpenResearch
Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research: This beginner-friendly workshop will focus on ways to make open data (especially research data) more easily usable and sharable, and attendees will also learn about the Open Knowledge International community. Looking for people to help with: coding, research Themes: #OpenData #OpenResearch
A Reproducible Open Access Awards for Students: I would like to discuss a template for a reproducible Open Access Award that can be run by student societies across universities. Prototype: https://github.com/Bubblbu/gss-oaa Looking for people to help with: coding, communications, community grassroots organizing, event planning, fundraising, Themes: #OpenAccess, #OpenResearch
Reading Together: Annotating Open Works: Participants will experiment together to annotate digital works using open tools and join together to add new layers of knowledge to open works, starting from texts generated/collected by OpenCon Cascadia speakers and participants. Bring your own links to digital works that inspire commentary! Looking for people to help with: research, thoughtful people Themes: #OpenData, #OpenEducation, #OpenResearch, #DiversityEquityInclusion
Have an idea? Write it on the whiteboard at the end of the room!
How can I participate?
The official do-a-thon date is on February 2nd, but we’re encouraging folks to get started before — and hopefully, carry on projects and collaboration after. Here are a few ways you can get involved and participate:
Anyone can propose something to work on. Is there a question or challenge you want to tackle? Do you want to teach something or learn? Here’s a chance to share it with the community and work together. Participants can submit proposals the day of the do-a-thon, but we’d love if folks could submit ideas in advance, too.
Anyone can propose a project for others to collaborate on and contribute to. Have a project idea you want to put into action? Or an existing project that needs development or support? The do-a-thon is a great opportunity to receive support and contributions from collaborators in the Pacific Northwest.
Anyone can contribute their skills and ideas to existing ideas and projects. Participate by contributing to one or more of the do-a-thon proposals submitted. We expect that most of the action will take place on February 2nd, but feel free to get in touch with project leads and see how you can help out beforehand! You’ll be able explore OpenCon Cascadia projects and idea in advance of and at the conference.