Ecology StanConnect 2021

Publicity Events
12

Hi all,
Since it seems like there’s interest in doing this, I have a couple of questions for you and @SGB. A proposal is due on 26 April.

  1. I need to select a platform and provide a cost estimate to @SGB. However, I will be changing institutions on 1 May, and so I don’t really know the details of what sort of Zoom account/policies I will have. Is anybody willing to co-organize by taking the lead on providing/costing the platform? Alternatively can @SGB wait until mid-May for details of the platform and a cost estimate?
  2. Organizers of the Cognitive Science StanConnect put out a public call for abstracts to be voted on by the community for acceptance. I could do the same, or I could hand-pick speakers. I think both options have advantages and disadvantages. Does anyone (including @SGB) have strong preferences here? Advantages of a public call for proposals and public voting include transparency, publicity, and ability to reach a wide variety of speakers, with resulting benefits for diversity and inclusion. Disadvantages include potential problems for diversity and inclusion depending on the vicissitudes of the voting, wasted abstract-writing effort of people whose abstracts aren’t accepted, the difficulty of translating voting into a coherent and well-balanced set of talks, and the possibility that we won’t attract enough submissions in the short available timeframe.
    If a community consensus in support of a public call doesn’t emerge by Wednesday evening of this week, I will hand-pick the speakers with an explicit commitment to diversity and inclusion and with a focus on using Stan for ecological models that are difficult to fit (or difficult to verify the validity of the fit) using alternative tools.
  3. We need to pick a date. July or September/October work best for me. I know that July might run into field seasons for some, while September/October might run into teaching/coursework obligations. If you think you might attend (even if not sure), please fill out the poll below (at the bottom of this post). If I end up hand-picking the speakers, I will balance the poll results against the speakers’ needs.
  4. We need to pick a time. As far as I know, the majority of people who have expressed interest are in the Americas, and so I suggest noon EDT as a time that would accommodate most people, including interested people in Africa and Europe.
  5. Unless there are strong objections, I will not follow the StanCon tradition of requiring that data and analyses be made available in permissively licensed markdown or Jupyter notebooks. This is to allow speakers flexibility in presenting ongoing work and to encourage participation from ecologists who don’t necessarily write the cleanest of code.

Cheers
Jacob

Poll: Date for Ecology StanConnect

Select all options that might work for you.

  • First half of July
  • Second half of July
  • September/October

0 voters

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