As any other interdisciplinary field, Bioinformatics requires a wide set of expertise. This implies many different ways to acquire Bioinformatics skills, from different backgrounds in Biology, Biotechnology, Informatics, Physics, and more. Typically, after University studies, one can specialise in specific Bioinformatics topics or skills through attending intensive (few-days long) courses or by consulting the corresponding training materials. We aim at mapping the “training journey” of different personas in Bioinformatics, visualising the steps needed to acquire expert knowledge in each topic, or skill. These steps will be linked to training materials when available, with comments on their quality, accessibility and potential integration. This will also allow identifying areas where training materials should be developed/enhanced by the community. E.g., one of the personas could be a wet-lab biologist aiming at learning how to process their data (with no previous experience). They will go through the “learning paths” of statistical analysis and data processing and visualisation. The latter will start with acquiring some programming skills. More in detail, the first step of learning programming would be to choose the programming language. The first resource linked in the map is a comparison between R and Python, and then a basic course (open source and fit for self-paced learning, such as The Carpentries materials) in the chosen language. If Python, the next step could be a software development course (e.g. CodeRefinery), etc. We will restrict this analysis to tangible steps in a “learning path”, to provide practical suggestions (courses and training materials, documents or blogs, etc.) on how to approach it in a limited timeframe. In the Biohackathon, it will be impossible to apply this exercise to the entire field of Bioinformatics. We plan to focus on specific personas of interest for the project participants, e.g. the staff of a scientific facility will focus on their users (in a small subgroup). This, to take this effort useful to them, hence sustainable in the long run. Indeed, we recognise that this initiative exists in a system of similar ones. The online resource Competency Hub lists the skill-set of several career profiles, including some links to training materials. This resource will be inspiring and useful, but while it serves to define the set of competencies for a role in the scientific community (while hiring or considering a career path), we aim at providing a practical guide for complete beginners, and a map to visualise the relationship between available open source training materials. To evaluate the learning paths proposed, we will also use the Mastery Rubric for Bioinformatics, a tool with reference to specific knowledge, skills and abilities in the field as well as training design principles. Another source of information will be the FORRT educational resources catalogue, which aims at classifying available training materials but doesn’t provide information about the dependencies between them. Similarly, we will consult the UNESCO Open Science and capacity building resources database, and repositories used for sharing training materials such as Zenodo. The existence of somewhat similar, parallel efforts is a strength of our project, as it is clearly of interest for numerous scientific communities, hence supporting its sustainability. We will discuss how to keep the project going beyond the Biohackathon and (although depending on the expertise of the people that will join) we expect to be able to provide a public repository generating a simple web portal, to share the resulting data and collect future contributions. We see a good potential for and will explore gamification of this resource: each persona might correspond to a character in a roleplay-game scenario, gaining levels through courses in the learning path. Primarily, however, we plan to make the Biohackathon output useful for the participants, and we expect as minimal outcome a user analysis of the different groups of training providers
Project Lead: Lisanna Paladin <