Hangout 3 Summary - Anna Sakoyan

0. General notes
This time there were only three of us: Irina, Jakes and me. 
First, this hangout was a lot shorter than the previous one. And we almost managed to fit the organisational part in this half and hour limit. Well, strictly speaking, it was around 40 minutes, but we almost did it!
And I think there were three reasons for this.
1. There were only three of us, so the challenge of coordinating a considerable group was not there. But this is not the most important factor.
2. We were really basing on the agenda and were trying to stick to it during the official part.
3. But what is most important, to my mind, is that we had a great deal of communication on the list over the past week, so we didn’t have all that much details to discuss, because we had already discussed it gradually while working on our particular tasks. I think this is really great. And we should keep it up.

Now, here’s the summary of the most significant points made during the hangout. And I’ll be basing on the agenda:

1. Summarize everyone's achievements and observations over the past week.
Jakes has enriched his collection of materials. But now he feels urge to focus on basics.
Irina also wants to concentrate on working with a small dataset

As for me, I have already shared my biggest achievement, so I’ll just paste the link here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aLFjmKN5Y7L_kydfSAprTXznbc2J6gswjaQwVI-5bNQ/edit

2. Go through the Mission messages and compare it with what we are doing.
        - Special attention to merging our data and probably to what we are to do about badges
Well, generally we agreed on the fact that what we are trying to do often exceeds what we actually have to do according to the instructions. On the one hand, it’s good because it makes us ambitious in the best sense of the word. On the other hand, it can be frustrating and inefficient if we get overwhelmed by it and forget about learning the basics.
For instance, every member of the Team, I think, knows that cleaning data means not simply removing all useless formatting, but also checking out if there are some malicious tricks in the data, fighting the Invisible Man and all that stuff.
But if we look at the Data Expedition instructions for cleaning data, they are much simpler and humbler. According to the instructions, our task is just to decide which data we are interested in, then remove all the rest and make it look friendly. That's all. So in order to finish this course, we only have to cover this. As to the Invisible Man, we shall learn how to deal with him later.
In this respect a very inspiring example was Zoltan's decision to start with a really small bit of data - namely, regarding Romania, and to learn how to deal with it.

So it is important to sometimes reread the Mission instructions. It makes things look less terrifying:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KbLoAvPsnxrTNqyeDtdvfDtJx4Wuub0taRv1V_X8Suk/edit#

2.a. Merging Our Data
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnCa4pymWsNNdHI3R1ZSdDBZRkhWUThkTElaMnFmcVE&usp=sharing
This is a Google Spreadsheet document shared in the way everyone can edit it. This was created to merge our work. It works like this. In this document, every Team member creates a separate sheet for themselves and copies/pastes there their individual project. All the analysis and visualisations are going to be collected there. Of course we can experiment and train using some extra copies, but this document has to be regularly updated.

2.b. Badges
And well, we decided that we should try and submit our projects for badges this week. Some of us can apply for facilitator’s badge, others for data cleaning and visualisation badges. Here’s the mission reference (the one Ketty kindly sent via the list):



3. Elaborate a method to measure our progress in the mission (that was Kettys idea initially)
This is an important thing to do, but it’s hard to measure and evaluate things when they’re in such a disorder. We thought that it would be easier to do after we try and merge our data (see above). 

4. Set our targets for the next week
4.a. Individual tasks:
Jakes: Trying to concentrate on the basics and follow the steps provided by the Mission instructions.
Irina's going to try and process some data in Google Refine - most probably her research will be focused on Russia. Generally, it is also about focusing on basics. Also, Irina is going to create a Diigo.com group for our collaboration and send the invitations to the other team members.
Me: I’m going to repeat all that I’ve already learnt on the example of top-10 CO2 emitters. And I would also like to try some data analysis.

4.b. Team Tasks for the Week:
- Create an account at https://www.diigo.com/ and join the Group when Irina creates it and sends the invitation.
- Submit at least some projects for badges
- Import (or paste) your individual data projects to our merged spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnCa4pymWsNNdHI3R1ZSdDBZRkhWUThkTElaMnFmcVE#gid=0)

Well, that’s it! Hope this summary will be helpful. Please contribute if I’ve missed something. And if you have any problems, don’t get stuck, ask other members - they may know the answer or where to look for it.

Also, the links shared during the hangout. Have a look, you might find some of them helpful:

Hangout3 Etherpad:
http://pad.p2pu.org/p/Team10_Hangout3


Merging Data
Just created a test spreadsheet, but it actually can be used for merging:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnCa4pymWsNNdHI3R1ZSdDBZRkhWUThkTElaMnFmcVE#gid=0

Helpful:
Kind people gave some tips on converting Text to Numerics in Google Spreadsheets. You might find them helpful as well:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/docs/spreadsheets/ErSBlxgFtuY

And there’s also a cloud-computing blog that might also be useful:
http://yogi--anand-consulting.blogspot.ru/

Bookmark storages:
https://delicious.com/
http://storify.com
Evernote

Some interesting findings:
The whole set of Data Expedition Mission messages (including the upcoming ones):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KbLoAvPsnxrTNqyeDtdvfDtJx4Wuub0taRv1V_X8Suk/edit#
(Very helpful to evaluate our progress and the course generally)

Messages to the Team (Anna Sakoyan is struggling to promote the usage of Google Docs cooperation tools inside the Team:
Sharing Google Docs: I doubt there’s going to be something new to you, but just in case:
http://ansakoy.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/to-team-10-data-expedition-sharing-google-docs/

Commenting on Google Docs
http://ansakoy.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=58&action=edit&message=6&postpost=v2


Just in case - old and well-known links:

Our shared Google Doc (Skills and Progress)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dydcLb2Y6EUG62efzCQllpO1LEzRIdV-q1UcK6mdRf4/edit

Our shared Google Doc (Resources):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wEX_v4ZgTkU7rOLpnmnn3fbpzkDO6SdYOjDYDq1ravU/edit

Create a new Etherpad:
http://pad.p2pu.org/