At ALife 2022, we will be running a workshop in which we collaboratively develop new online resources (The Encyclopedia of Artificial Life) to teach others about the field of Artificial Life. These resources will help generate increased interest in ALife research, make onboarding new students easier, and facilitate the sharing of ALife software. In other words, they will benefit us all. Now that the ISAL website is configured to allow contributions from many people, the time is ripe to hold a session where we all get together and actually write these resources.
Who should come?
Everyone who’s interested in helping! To make this effort successful, we’ll need people from all parts of the field at a wide range of career stages. Are you a brand new student? Great! We need you to tell us what resources would help you get up to speed. Are you a seasoned ALife researcher? Also great! Your wealth of knowledge and experience will be invaluable.
Workshop Structure
- Brief introduction to the goals of the workshop and the practicalities of contributing to the workshop (including getting everyone set up as a contributor).
- Collective brainstorming session to identify resource pages that the site should ideally have and select some to prioritize in this workshop.
- Participants will break into small groups based on which pages they are interested in working on. In these groups, participants will generate an outline for the page on their selected topic and then begin the process of writing the body of the page.
- Participants not actively writing will be encouraged to peruse other groups’ outlines and suggest any additions they think are appropriate.
- As groups finish writing the text of their page, they will exchange their work with other groups to receive feedback.
- After the workshop, other conference attendees will also be encouraged to read over the new web pages and make suggestions on how to further improve them.