The Carpentries Tagathon - Our Hacktoberfest Initiative
Love our blog posts? Want to read more of them, help make them easier to find and share them with others? Join our Tagathon October 28 - November 1 to add tags to past posts and connect with others in the community about what we learn, share and teach.
Our community at The Carpentries thrives because individuals are eager to learn from and impart their knowledge on each other. Knowledge sharing is not the preserve of our hands-on, interactive, programming workshops. Rather, from Australia, Japan, Costa Rica, South Africa, the UK and Norway, community members have time and again found new, exciting, sometimes unconventional and memorable ways to interact with each other.
Penned by our community members and published on our different websites, blog posts have proven a timeless resource - allowing people to troubleshoot tech issues, unlearn, share and pick up best practices, table new ideas for discussion, start new collaborations, and reaffirm data and programming principles.
Over time, as new members have become a part of our community and new resources have been made available, a lot of the wisdom tucked away in our blogs has remained available, but unknown to many. We want to take steps to change this.
 Question on navigation by tags on the Data Carpentry blog posed by Angela Li and amplified by Jonah Duckles in August 2019
Thanks to continuous team discussions and the input of our community members, we have identified improving discoverability of posts on our blog as a good place to start, and adding tags to blog posts will be our first stop in this direction. As you may recall, we did some initial work around this in the second quarter of 2019, and focussed our efforts on the central Carpentries blog. You can read about our initial efforts on standardising tags on The Carpentries blog in this post.
Between October 28 and November 1 2019, we hope to run The Carpentries Tagathon - a week-long online hackathon whose aim is to add between one and three tags to each of our community posts on the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry blogs.
We Need You
Here’s how you can help.
Read our existing guide to selecting tags for blog posts published in The Carpentries realm and use it as a reference to guide your contributions in The Carpentries Tagathon week. Should you notice gaps in this resource, open an issue in The Carpentries Handbook repository on GitHub and share your observations or submit a Pull Request with suggested improvements and edits.
Read blog posts on the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry blogs and suggest one to three appropriate tags for each post in a Pull Request, or in the comments section under each post. The Community Development team will actively monitor blog post comments, and tag-related issues in the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry website repositories during The Carpentries Tagathon week.
Help spread the word about The Carpentries Tagathon week, which is scheduled to take place in the last week of HacktoberFest . Tweet out this post (hashtag hacktoberfest), mention it in a community call so others can join in, on facebook and LinkedIn, or in other relevant spaces where communities of researchers, librarians, technologists convene.
Contributing on GitHub
All GitHub contributions towards Carpentries Tagathon count for Instructor Checkout. For anyone submitting Pull Requests or opening tag-related issues,
please reference the tagathon-related issue in each of the three repositories to help us keep track of all GitHub contributions during our Tagathon week.
All issues and Pull Requests associated with this initiative will have the label ‘tagathon’ applied to them. You can find all of them under this search result on GitHub(bookmark it). Remember to check through the results from the link to see if any other contributions have been made on the blog posts you’d like to contribute to. If so, comment under existing issues and Pull Requests, if not, open one. However, duplications are not fatal and The Carpentries team will be at hand to help manage these when they happen.
Remember to register on the HacktoberFest website with your GitHub account, and you stand a chance to win a t-shirt for your contributions.
Happy reading!