Project Leads:
- Renato Alves (EMBL/ELIXIR-DE) -
- Nina Norgren (NBIS/ELIXIR-SE) -
Project Overview
LEA (formerly TraMa) is an open-source Learning Events Assistant designed to address the many logistical and administrative challenges faced by training coordinators, including the automation of time-consuming manual processes. Building on our successful participation in the 2023 and 2024 BioHackathons, we propose to advance LEA's core functionality while using the hackathon as a collaborative space to gather community input and strengthen connections within the training ecosystem.
Problems and Challenges
Training coordination in life sciences often involves fragmented workflows, with organizers performing many steps across a variety of patched-together tools or inflexible commercial solutions. Key challenges include: laborious manual registration processes, lack of standardized feedback collection, limited integration between platforms, and insufficient crediting and trainer network tooling. These issues are particularly difficult for academic institutions that need flexible solutions adaptable to diverse needs and broad communities.
Proposed Activities
This year's focus centers on improving user experience and core platform features:
- Improving the API-first architecture by expanding the underlying data model to cover feedback and task automation Implementing a hierarchical organization-first action-based permission model along with integration with Life Science AAI (LS Login)
- Integrating and automating feedback collection at pre-, post- and impact stages
- Promote adoption of the system by expanding styling and theme modding possibilities
Relevance within de.NBI & ELIXIR Germany
LEA supports training and capacity building goals of de.NBI and ELIXIR Germany by aiming to provide infrastructure that makes training organization simpler, more straightforward and standards-compliant. The platform's open-source and community-driven development ensures all improvements are readily available to any interested parties. Integrations with other tools in this space (including TeSS, TMD) will help promote a featureful, flexible and reliable ecosystem of training infrastructure. By creating a unified, compatible platform that reduces administrative overhead, LEA aims to bring quality-of-life features to training coordinators and allow streamlining of course organisation workflows. The project contributes to FAIR training practices through standardized metadata collection and assists with training material management. LEA's focus on trainer recognition and networking also strengthens the professional development aspects essential to sustainable training communities.
Expected Outcomes
We expect to implement the proposed features bringing LEA closer to a first production-grade release. As in other years, we also expect to collect precious feedback from the many discussions during the BioHackathon, that will help shape up the next steps in LEA's development.
Who are we looking for?
We welcome everybody who is interested in contributing to this project to join us at the 2025 Biohackathon Germany. If you are a developer and have experience with API design, and frontend / back-end architectures, Django or Vuejs, we would love to hear from you. A ready made online available development environment on GitPod is available to allow fast developer onboarding before, during and after the BioHackathon. Besides the code development planned for the BioHackathon, we welcome the opportunity to connect with you, as a trainer or training coordinators, or to collect your use-cases so as to better tailor the features of the platform to support your needs.