Cryosphere Code Incubator Community [codeincubator]

Workshop summary

Programming is an increasingly important skill for cryosphere scientists, yet most have little to no formal training in writing code or in software development. Until the cryospheric sciences can develop a truly Open Science and Open-Source culture—with the associated training, skills, and awareness of best practices—most cryosphere scientists will require additional resources in the form of learning and collaboration to contribute to and make use of platforms like Ghub. To address this gap in technical skills and knowledge sharing, we propose a 6-month project to build a platform for cryosphere scientists to share code that can range from unfinished to ready-for-use. The platform will build on the existing structure of Ghub to provide a space for cryosphere scientists to search for code, request topics, and share resources for others to draw on. The code and resources collected over this several month period will be used as source material for a workshop modeled on a hack-a-thon structure at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, NY, where teams can work to develop stand-alone packages and tools to be hosted on Ghub.