Speaker Guidelines and Topics for Data Science CoP
- The Data Science Community of Practice (DS CoP) is a team engaged in the organization's mission at Hack for LA, both for social impact and professional development.
- Members of the CoP can benefit from exposure to practitioners who have experience in the fieldm to glean insights, best practices, career advice, or collaborate with fellow members or invited guests.
- Topics range widely from (but not limited to):
- Learning relevant skills for working within teams
- Sharing a case study, portfolio, or product idea
- Obtaining a job in the field of UI/UX
- Learning about new trends in the field
- Topics may be prompted by current members or the speakers themselves.
- The DS CoP at Hack for LA is a great place for speakers to give back knowledge to their community, practice their public speaking, or gain exposure in a civic tech setting to current members and anyone they choose to invite.
- Invited guests from various tech companies
- Alumni who currently have a UI/UX role
- Alumni who have worked in fields adjacent to UI/UX
- Current members who want feedback on:
- A product from another HfLAn Team
- Their portfolio
- An upcoming job presentation
- A case study
- A HfLA guide
The structure is up to the speaker. However, a format that has worked in the past has been to send a GitHub issue to DS CoP members ahead of time that collects questions.
Please see the bottom of this page for topics requested by current members
The CoP Co-Leads will collate the questions into common themes and send the list of questions back to the speaker who then develops a structure of their talk based upon the common questions.
The DS CoP is also eager to receive speakers that have their own agenda or own views to showcase as long as they are relevant to professional development or skills in the Data Science or Artificial Intelligence industry.
In order to give enough time for this format to work, we recommend the following timeline:
3-4 weeks before talk: Speaker agrees and consents to delivering a talk based upon a particular topic.
2-3 weeks before talk: Co-Leads develop Q&A issue and send to DS CoP members via the DS Slack Channel (see example Slack announcement).
1-2 weeks before talk: Co-Leads organize the questions into themes and send back to the speaker.
Day of talk: Speaker delivers talk based upon questions.
Day of talk: Late arriving questions are added to the Q&A time at the end of the speaker's presentation.
If you require more or less time, please let the Co-Leads know.
The DS CoP meets for one hour to hear the presentation.
We cannot guarantee that the Zoom meeting will go beyond one hour due to other HfLA meetings being scheduled on the same Zoom account.
We recommend planning to deliver a 30 minute talk, leaving about 20-25 minutes for Q&A. However, you may decide to adjust the talk-to-Q&A ratio.
Talks given to the DS CoP have no defined structure.
Level of formality is entirely up to you. Past examples have included:
- Talk with a formal slide deck
- Walkthrough of website or document
- Casual conversation answering questions from attendees
You may decide to have your talk recorded and shared internally with DS CoP members or externally in other HfLA channels.
We have also had presenters share information with attendees and later decide to withdraw from sharing their talk more broadly.
Even if content is shared only with attendees during a meeting, we cannot guarantee that identifiable information will not be shared beyond the group. Therefore, be careful about sharing sensitive information with the group!
In most cases, we announce talks internally via our DS Slack Channel. This means that only DS CoP members would have access to the Zoom link, although the speaker may invite others to attend.
Depending on your preference, we may decide to announce the talk via our Meetup account. This would allow individuals from the general public to attend the talk.
Work with the CoP Co-Leads to decide how open or closed you would like to make your talk available to others.
Link: Speaker Consent Form for Presentation The consent form for speakers includes the following: Advertising your presentation Recording audio and video files Sharing and storing presentation materials You will be given an opportunity on the form to provide specific instructions or accommodations.
The recorded talks will be shared in our Wiki
- Emerging trends in DS. What's new? including AI, Human Computer Interaction, what skills to learn to be competitive?
- Data collection and preprocessing best practices
- Data engineering and how that can be crossed with web development
- What inspired you to pursue DS?
- What do you know about Model Context Protocol, a protocol for ingress of data to Retrieval Augmented Generation?
- Tell us about your personal experience with data. What data have you worked with? What part of DS are you involved in?
- What would you tell yourself 5 years ago that would have made things easier/better for your progress?
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