The Project Pythia Hackathon: Developing Scientists' Skills and Community in Open Source Development and Education

Project Pythia, a collaborative initiative within the Pangeo community, focuses on creating and maintaining high quality, open source educational resources that facilitate the learning and application of Python in the geosciences. Central to our mission are the Project Pythia Cookbooks—online Jupyter Books authored openly and collaboratively by the Pangeo community. These Cookbooks share scientific concepts, workflows, and programming examples that demonstrate reproducibility, sustainability, and maintainability through testing, publication, citation, and open development via GitHub and Zenodo.

As part of our ongoing efforts and supported by a second U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) award, we began offering yearly hackathons designed to foster collaboration, skill development, and community building among “Scientists Who Code”. These hackathons are multi-day hybrid synchronous events, conducted both online and in person, where dozens of scientists come together to create and enhance Pythia Cookbooks. Participants engage in hands-on experience actively authoring scientific code, navigating code infrastructure via GitHub Actions, contributing to open source projects through Pull Requests on GitHub, and earning citable scholarly attribution.

In our second year of these public hackathons, we introduced the appointment of breakout group leaders. These leaders, selected through invitations or an open application process during registration, brought their expertise and ideas to guide groups of contributors. Together, they worked on creating or enhancing Pythia Cookbooks in their areas of scientific interest and expertise, supported by a diverse group of participants with varying skills and career levels. Interested participants also had opportunities to develop the infrastructure of Project Pythia itself through collaboration with the MyST and Jupyterbook v2.0 team.

We prepared our groups and their leaders on the publicly documented Pythia Cookbook development process to foster peer learning between group members and between different groups. We provided a community reporting and check-in process in which individual participants shared their efforts every day of the event. We offered multiple such sessions at different times of day to connect virtual and in-person participants with each other for further peer support and engagement.

In this talk, we discuss the processes behind the organization of the hackathons, the outcomes observed during the events, and the feedback gathered from participants through surveys. We highlight takeaways for improving our future hackathons and the value of the hackathon for scientists and other non-developers to grow skills in open collaboration, reproducible science, and sustainable development. We introduce the audience to efforts in the broader hackathon community, without which our event would have been impossible. Finally, we invite listeners to participate in future Project Pythia Hackathons!