First up, we're going to hear from Hugo Brisson from Disconnected Elements to a Harmonyne
Ecosystem, the APRiverse Trace Project.
Hi, my name is Hugo.
I'm the lead software architect at data.org and today I would like to talk to you about
the work that we are doing to build a harmonious ecosystem for epidemiology as part of the
APRstrace project.
So today's scientific research relies more and more on data science and computational
tools and this is true across fields such as epidemiology, climate science or econometrics.
But the pipelines that are used by these data scientists are getting also increasingly complicated
to maintain and to update.
And to change just a single step in this pipeline just to use a different piece of software,
you may have to spend hours of data wrangling just to get the right format for the inputs
and the outputs.
And the problem is that this maintenance that is really complicated is something that we
cannot afford when we are in the middle of a crisis.
The price is just too high to pay.
When the next pandemic hits and we want to get really fast results to understand what's
happening, it's not the time to do basic boring data wrangling, we want to do actual science
instead.
And so set differently, we have some good isolated free software tool but we don't need
just good isolated pieces of software, we need a robust ecosystem as a whole.
And this is precisely what the APRstrace project is about.
It's an international multistakeholder project to harmonize the ecosystem of epidemiology
tooling in R.
And we do this by making the existing pieces interoperable, by supporting existing tools
to adopt global standards such as the ones that are defined by the Digital Public Good
Alliance or organizations like R OpenSci and by developing a community, a sustainable community
around these ideals.
I can also define our goals by what we don't want to achieve.
We don't want to erase the existing established communities.
We recognize that diversity of solutions is good, it's nice to have a rich ecosystem but
we need interoperability in this ecosystem.
And so the way that we do this is by involving the community.
We work with existing established communities and by this I mean both established communities
of users such as public health institutes or NGOs but also existing communities of developers.
And in the end what we want is to come up with a solution that increases usability, sustainability
and maintainability for everyone involved.
We've had already quite a lot of success with this approach.
We've managed to package and release a lot of un-maintained non-portable code bases
and including many more tools than the ones that are presented here but just for the sake
of this session I should mention that two of them are already registered DPGs and one
is in the process of being submitted.
Having a sustainable network of collaborators is something that is really exciting and really
ambitious but as you can guess it comes also with challenges and in particular research
and academia are really competitive spaces which makes it difficult to build some collaboration
between some communities.
Additionally, because we have a multi-stakeholder community, communication is really difficult
in a network that has so many collaborators and so many nodes which creates delays and
miscommunication and the question is how to build something that is sustainable even
though funding isn't probably in this space.
To conclude I hope that I managed to convince you that responding to this crisis be it the
climate crisis or the next pandemic will require interoperable tools and that this can only
be done for collaboration and multi-stakeholder project.
But even though it's necessary to have this kind of complex community it also brings a
lot of extra challenges especially around communication, collaboration and sustainability
and in the end what may appear initially as a technical challenge is even more of a communication
and social challenge.
With this I will finish just with a picture of the entire core team of the project and
invite you to come to talk to me if you're interested about any of this.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.
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