Main goals
This workshop was organized as satellite event to the main yearly international conference on algebraic combinatorics FPSAC (Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics). It aimed at gathering researchers from this community interested in computation for training, community building, and coding sprints.
OpenDreamKit implication
Nicolas M. Thiéry was one of the organizers. There was no registration fee. OpenDreamKit funded meals and nights taken by the participants at the local Youth Hostel (Dijaski dom Vic, Gerbičeva ulica 51a, Ljubljana).
Event summary
The workshop featured a total of 16 tutorial
sessions, 8 demos and 6 presentations, including the following
presentations by OpenDreamKit participants: Best practice for computer
exploration'',Live online notebooks with Binder’’, Object
oriented programming in Sage'',Authoring SageMath packages’’,
free/libre software is good and what you can do about it'',
Sage-Combinat-Widgets, Francy’’.
The first plenary talk was about inspiring the next generation, notably women, about the impact using and developing computational software can have on conducting one’s research in algebraic combinatorics. The main purpose of the remaining plenary talks was to pave the path for the implementation of new features in SageMath and related software, to ignite, inspire and fuel brainstorms and coding sprints with other participants. Training took the form of short demos to give an overview of the OpenDreamKit toolkit, tutorials that were presented to point participants to resources to explore according to their pace and taste, with continuous support from instructors, and guided tutorials/longer presentations in separate rooms. Participants were encouraged to skip the parts that were irrelevant to them (e.g. tutorials on material they already master) to engage into parallel collaborative activities such as coding sprints.
Demographics
Out of 56 participants, 19 were PhD students and 37 researchers or professors, 15 from european countries (Germany, France, Slovenia, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria, Iceland), 21 from North America (US, the Carribbean, Canada) 1 from Australia and 19 from all over the world (Israel, Korea, Turkey, India, China, Nigeria, Chile). We had 15 female participants to this workshop. Although still far from satisfactory with respect to the last four years this gender gap in the software development area tends to shrink, with several bright young women taking on lead roles.
Results and impact
More than one fifth of the FPSAC participants decided to participate to this event; they actively engaged into the collaborative atmosphere; a lot of expertise was shared, not counting new software contributions. One of the participant wrote back ``Thanks again for a very useful Sage Days. I was happy that the Dynamics package got finished … Its fantastic how you’ve shepherded this community over many years now, and the mathematical community is much better for it.’’. Another decided to organize a similar satellite event to FPSAC’20.