A talk whose exercises people keep
From open data to shared knowledge: computing, automation and AI for research and teaching, for the Instituto de Ingeniería in Venezuela.
One repository, three jobs
The Instituto de Ingeniería invited me to give an online talk under the title “De los datos abiertos al conocimiento compartido”. Instead of slides that disappear after the session, I built a bilingual site and a public repository that is, at the same time, the presentation, the material and the classroom.
Three guided exercises run through GitHub Actions: analyse a CSV file, make a chart, and build a PDF from Markdown and images. Participants fork the repository and run them from their own copy, so what they take home is not a memory of a demonstration but a working set of tools under their own name.
Exhibit 1DiagramRead left to right
A talk whose exercises people keep
The talk points to three exercises. Each runs in the cloud from the participant’s own fork, and each leaves a result in their repository: a table, a chart, a document.
Where the examples come from
The talk draws on things I have actually done: ATLAS Open Data, the CoAfina hackathon, Creative Commons Venezuela, the LAGO computing in Mérida and the Reality Map atlas. Each one is an example of the same move, taking something open and making it usable by someone else.
The repository has already had a second life. It became the template for the first-contribution exercise of a young researchers’ network in Venezuela, where members practise the same workflow: fork, edit, open a pull request, see the result.
Exhibit 2ResourcesOpen the thing itself, not a description of it