September: Movement Validation Month @ OpenWorm

Welcome to Movement Validation month! This content has been cross-posted from the OpenWorm Foundation blog and Chee-Wai Lee's blog.

Movement Motivations

The behavior of C. Elegans is partially captured by their movement characteristics. We develop and work with a number of tools for recording, characterizing, storing, analyzing, and sharing worm movement data.

Our goal is to eventually be able to compare the movement behavior of worms generated via simulation, against real instances of C. Elegans objectively and quantitatively.

The month of September 2018 will see some focus on this activity. We hope you will participate and do stuff that’s interesting to you!

Our Tools
The Database - We work with many others who record the movement activities of real live specimens of C. Elegans. That extended community has generously shared their data via our movement database tool (Github Repo here.)

A Common Data Format - To facilitate the sharing and exchange of data, we have developed the WCON format and accompanying libraries for manipulating data. We are working to support as many languages as we can. Our code repository can be found here.

Tools for Movement Analysis - The code base for our collection of tools to analyze movement is found here.

Activities for the Month
Planning - We have a range of active tool development issues we would like to review, and create tasks for. We expect to discuss this over the course of the first and second weeks. This should happen in our OpenWorm Slack channel #Movement-Analysis. We expect to also discuss new ideas/projects people might like to do, and lay out goals (e.g. integration of production code in OpenWorm’s Docker image.) We will kick this off with an Office Hours presentation in the OpenWorm Slack channel #office-hours on Sep 5th 4pm UTC.

Doing Interesting Stuff - Over the rest of the month, we will break off to work on individual tasks, have discussions, get questions answered. Activities can take many forms over a wide range of skill sets, technical or creative:

1. Create Blog/Art content.
2. Improve code/tool design.
3. Develop new features.
4. Explore new science/analysis techniques.

This will culminate in one or more hackathons over the last week of the month to round off the work. We also expect to create a number of open badges (see https://www.badgelist.com/OpenWorm) for tasks/educational activities that can be built around our results for wider community engagement.

Participate and Share

We encourage both new and experienced volunteers to participate! For newcomers, the best way to do so is filling out our volunteer application form.

After we have had a chance to look at your application, an invite will sent for you to join us in Slack. From there we can work with you to find stuff that you may be interested to work with, and people in the community you can get in touch with.

We look forward to hearing from you!