Seeking participants for December hackathon!

iDigBio and Zooniverse’s Notes from Nature Project are pleased to invite you to participate in a hackathon to further enable public participation in online transcription of biodiversity specimen labels.  The event will occur from December 16-20, 2013, at iDigBio in Gainesville, FL, though you may choose to participate in a subset of the days based upon the schedule.   We are especially looking for participation from the most enthusiastic and committed citizen science transcribers!  This is a great opportunity to have a direct influence on expanding this tool in the directions you would like to see it go.

The hackathon will produce new functionality and interoperability for Zooniverse’s Notes from Nature  and similar transcription tools.  There are four areas of development that will be progressively addressed throughout the week.

1. Linking images registered to the iDigBio Cloud with transcription tools in order to alleviate storage issues.  (Monday)
2. Transcription QA/QC and the reconciliation of replicate transcriptions.  (Remainder of week)
3. Integration of OCR into the transcription workflow.  (Remainder of week)
4. New UI features and novel incentive approaches for public engagement.  (Remainder of week)

There will be opportunities to narrow the focus in each category of activity in a teleconference tentatively scheduled for early in the week of November 25 (and also at the TDWG meeting and the iDigBio Summit, if you are attending either of those events).

If you are interested, please get in touch with Austin Mast (amast@bio.fsu.edu) by Wednesday, Nov 1.  iDigBio has budgeted some funds to support travel costs.

With best regards,

Austin and Rob Guralnick (UC-Boulder), co-organizers