Re: Introduction

[Yaroslav Halchenko <debian@onerussian.com>]

Hi Enric,

thank you for reaching out!  I just want to follow up on one aspect:
even without any coding/packaging, everyone can contribute to the big
long lasting positive effect for Debian and "Open"
science/software/health/... by promoting open practices, software and
licenses to apply and legal safeguards (e.g. participant consent forms
etc).  

Quite often in Debian (and elsewhere) we encounter interested in open
sharing researchers who have not thought about open sharing whenever
they initiated study or the project.  That often makes it hard or
impossible for THEM later to either share the products of their work, or
even at times to USE their own work (e.g. if they change
employers, or decide to reuse materials they have surrended their
copyright for).

Shameless plug: have a look at our very brief publication
https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/4/1/s13742-015-0072-7/2707572
principles of which apply also to improve reproducibility of research.
For that we promote thinking ahead while developing any
(neuroimaging in our case) study and provide this "short HOWTO" with
more pointers http://5steps.repronim.org/ .

So, altogether -- promoting healthy open practices from the beginning of
any study design/plan etc would be of great help to Debian and beyond.

Cheers,

On Sat, 02 Oct 2021, Enric Garcia Torrents wrote:

>    Hello!

>    I am Enric, new to the project. I am a medical anthropologist with very
>    limited coding experience. My current research involves designing and
>    developing an open source decision making support system, specifically for
>    those cases regarded as severe by the current main psychiatric
>    understanding. I hold the hope such system could be adapted for other
>    uses, but that's the scope of what I am working on, fortunately with funds
>    to carry on the work for five more years.

>    My interest in Debian pure blends started ten years ago when I was
>    fortunate to get involved in ArbyX, a Stanford Law School Codex' project
>    on decision making in international arbitration courts. Unfortunately my
>    involvement on that stalled for several reasons, but always kept in mind
>    how important it is for people to have an access as easy as possible to
>    free suits to do their job without worrying about very often unaffordable
>    expenses, the burden of learning how to run the system at least as much as
>    to install all packages and make them work without an issue, and so on.

>    The arbitration project had a higher scope than the decision making one,
>    but basically it's the same idea with a medical twist. That involved power
>    maps of the players involved, and so do medicine. Involved adding data,
>    and medicine -specially research and the development of treatments for new
>    communities- also requires that. My experience, as I have been taught, is
>    that software alone is not enough. Hopefully we can package it all, and
>    create a tool set ready for those that need it.

>    At the moment I really don't know how I can contribute other than maybe
>    doing my best to help fire up other communities, help you spread the word
>    about Debian Med, and help others join in the effort, on top of doing my
>    very best to get to speed quickly on the Debian development part of it -as
>    I mentioned to Andreas and the rest of the crew present on today's
>    videocall (my apologies the connection was horrible and ran into other
>    issues), I have next to zero idea on how to package and maintain-.

>    No idea how long it take, because I am a medicine fresher too and that
>    will take a massive amount of time. But I will, because I feel it's
>    essential. Really admire what you have achieved developing Debian, it's
>    impressive. Thanks.
-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Center for Open Neuroscience     http://centerforopenneuroscience.org
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik