All participants and volunteers must agree to abide by the following Code of Conduct.
Participants
Participants will need to register as a team of 2-5 Northern California Region undergraduate students (Masters students can also participate as Coaches!). This is a free event with some food and beverages provided, though you will need to bring your own laptop equipped with preferred data analysis software. Participants may freely come and go, but all work must be done on site.
Though this is indeed a competition, it is meant to be a friendly one! As such collaboration is highly encouraged. As well, ASA Datafest coaches (grad students, faculty, data professionals, et al.) will be available throughout to assist you. If you wish to participate but don’t have a team, check out our FAQ for more information.
Event Volunteers
This could be as a Coach, a Judge or a general event volunteer.
Coach
Coaches walk around and talk with teams to see how they’re doing. Help them brainstorm ideas, refine ideas and most importantly help them come back to reality in what is feasible in the 2 day period. Sometimes teams have amazing ideas but either the data they need to answer their question isn’t collected/available, or the effort to complete the idea is much larger than they realize. So trimming down ideas.
Experience with coding languages can be helpful, but not necessary. A general ability to help them google the information is enough. For example, one year the competition data involved certain substance use rates across a geographic area. Some teams wanted to pull in census data to correlate population demographic with substance use at the county level. That team needed help figuring out where to get county level census information, identifying what keys to join on and thinking about what level of aggregation was reasonable to match on or display.
Judge
Judges spend a few hours on Sunday listening to presentations, deliberating and awarding prizes. We strive to have a diverse panel of judges with at least one subject matter expert.
Event Volunteer
This is a fully volunteer run event! We need people to do food pickups and meal setup, setup and breakdown, staff the registration desk to check students in, keep the snack table stocked, put up signage and answer questions as needed.