07-10, 13:15–13:45 (US/Pacific), Room 315
In this talk, I will discuss how one can foster a culture of open source contributions at one's company. Based on my successes and failures as a data scientist working in the biotech space, I will describe two key ideas (fostering internal open source and articulating value to key senior leadership) as being on the critical path to generating buy-in within the organization.
In this talk, I will discuss ideas on how one can foster a culture of open source contributions within one's data science organizations.
In particular, I will discuss two things in more detail: (a) a game plan for developing the necessary habits for external open source project engagement by implementing the same ideas on internal shared tooling, and (b) a framework for articulating the value of open source contributions as part of expertise development in addition to the economic benefits of utilizing open source tooling.
(a) is necessary because one of the activation barriers to external OSS engagement is the social norms and habits surrounding open source contributions. We will bring these to light during the talk, and discuss how to concretely import those norms into one's organization.
(b) is necessary to sustain the culture of open source software engagement, because for-profit entities are necessarily in the business of ensuring healthy returns on investment in one's resources. We will discuss frameworks for communicating the value of open source (economic value, training/professional development, and social responsibility) and how to frame those value statements, and discuss mental frameworks for identifying whether one's contributions would conflict with one's organization's commercial interests as a way of equipping our teammates with the necessary skills of good judgment.
As Principal Data Scientist at Moderna Eric leads the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (Research) team to accelerate science to the speed of thought. Prior to Moderna, he was at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research conducting biomedical data science research with a focus on using Bayesian statistical methods in the service of discovering medicines for patients. Prior to Novartis, he was an Insight Health Data Fellow in the summer of 2017 and defended his doctoral thesis in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT in the spring of 2017.
Eric is also an open-source software developer and has led the development of pyjanitor, a clean API for cleaning data in Python, and nxviz, a visualization package for NetworkX. He is also on the core developer team of NetworkX and PyMC. In addition, he gives back to the community through code contributions, blogging, teaching, and writing.
His personal life motto is found in the Gospel of Luke 12:48.