 they can catch this witty banter. Friday afternoon after a week long sprint. This will be a hilarious video. To Gaia. Cheers. I knew nothing about Gaia before this week started. I still only know marginally more about Gaia. So just now, an hour ago, we have wrapped up a week of the Gaia Sprint 2018 Seattle satellite edition. Long time viewers of this channel will remember I promised my soul to David Hogg. So I will commit here that I will peer live via hologram. I failed to peer via hologram but instead I carried out my own sprint. There was a lot of science being done. There were a lot of cool plots that were made. There was a lot of new code written. It's fascinating to see what 20 people you put in a room for a week and tell them to just be focused and work on this one thing and they just get so much done. One thing I like about it is it's 10 to 20 people who have different backgrounds too. There are some people here who have theoretical backgrounds, who have data backgrounds, people who are stars and the only theme was we said do something related to Gaia. A lot of cool things came out. And that's the kind of thing you can't do remotely. People have asked me in the past, you know, could you do this kind of sprint or hackathon or something remotely and I don't think it'll work because just having this this element of like chance where you go hey I don't know how to you know integrate this function and someone else goes oh did you know there was this I just overheard you but there's this thing in the software package that you can use for exactly that problem. It's very organic and that doesn't happen when I'm just hacking alone in my basement which is how I participated in the first guys print. I pitched this idea to ostensibly our boss and he said sure what do you need and I said coffee and food and he said okay this Institute's only been around for under a year really and we haven't had that many of these kinds of events here yet. So I was really pleased that administration supported this very fluidly very very easily and it also meant that since I was essentially the organizing committee of one I could decide when we got coffee each day. I have a question for you as organizer. Yeah. Do you get nervous before a sprint in terms of how little we can prepare right for a conference you set up all your talks or you set up all your tutorials and all you need to do is troubleshooting like if a speaker doesn't come for a hack week or for a sprint you essentially appear with no plan and hope that your participants will come with their own plans and I always sit there and think what if nobody has a project like what if they come and they sit down and they're like what do we do now. It's funny and I was never worried about them not having ideas that's funny I didn't worry about that I worry about what people even show up to my party. We ran this as a shoestring operation morning of I wouldn't got two pots of coffee because I didn't know we were either gonna have four of us be there and drink a lot of coffee. So at nine o'clock when I when the doors opened as it were and I sat there two boxes of coffee from downstairs there was four there was four of us upstairs but at like nine oh five this group of people from Canada had driven down and they walked in the door with suitcases in hand and two people ran in who were running late and so by about nine ten we had about twelve people. One of my explicit goals to sort of experiment about how we can run these events geographically separated right so we were three thousand miles from our partner sprinters. One thing that worked well is we did have a slack channel where people were chatting. I actually thought that was pretty successful oh I've seen online that you're working on this can I ask you an explicit question or can you send me a file. That I thought was very effective because I knew they were working on it this week because they were at the New York version. That's something unless you have a big overlap from year to year that's not something you can plan for like that'll happen one year and then the next year nobody will use it for reasons that are big group dynamics. The other thing I think that changes dynamics a bit if you expect mostly local people to show up are mostly foreign people because I think in New York there were a lot of people who were who came in from other places. Whenever you're local you risk that you end up saying oh I'm just going to go for a few hours but then there's this meeting I have to go to and I have to do this other thing you end up you know going in and out a lot and that's both disruptive to your own work and I think if a lot of people do that that can also be disruptive to the group as a whole. I had a couple people who decided like last week that they were going to join in and they were able to come for parts the week and I really appreciate that because they brought a lot of expertise but I'm glad there wasn't the majority of people. Trade off there between what's reasonable and what you can reasonably expect from people because people have lives and families and other important things. What time are we supposed to get drinks? Four. Four? All right let's wrap this. Takeaways. Parallel geographically isolated but parallel events a win. If you have critical mass. If you have critical mass which we did. From all online appearances the New York Sprint looked really successful. It's kind of staggering how much science has been done with Gaia in six weeks. That's true. And then like my takeaway from this weekend all of my projects is I have only scratched the surface with this machine. All right let's go get some wine.