All about the Springschool

The Brain, Behavior & Society Springschool represents a unique collaborative workshop or conference that tries to combine elements of Hackathons, Unconferences, and educationals. For this, we took the ideas and concepts of BrainHack and extend it to all scientific disciplines within the field of neuroscience, cognitive science, biology, psychology and social sciences to name only few. In short we want to bring scientists of all faculties together to work on innovative projects and follow one common goal that represents the topic of this Springschool.

Some key points

Most of the time during this Springschool is allocated to open working time during which attendees are encouraged to work together and learn from each other in interdisciplinary teams on projects that utilize mostly computational techniques to solve problems related to the topic of the springschool. Periodic unconference sessions provide an opportunity for attendees to share their expertise on topics that become relevant through the course of the event. In parallel to these activities, an educational track provide hands-on tutorials on basic software development skills, on new scientific tools and innovative statistical methods.

For attendees:

We want to encourage participants from all scientific disciplines to join the event with their mindset ready to collaborate on projects and hope it will also lead to a better chance of collaborating and networking. At the same time, we hope it will help project leaders get collaborators too.

  • Attendees are asked to commit to a project for the duration of Springschool.
  • Attendees can work on any of the project found here or on the Brainhack Global website or any other resource.
  • Attendees will receive an email days before the event to select the project they will work on.
  • Projects are the perfect chance for active collaboration, networking and hands-on learning, both during and after the event.

For project leaders:

  • Projects can focus on any technique or method, use text, medical, behavioral, or neuroimaging data, or explore any topic related to Open Science.
  • Projects can involve any stage of the scientific process, from data acquisition to analysis and documentation, as well as data visualization and scientific publication.
  • Projects can also be focused on creating tutorials or improving the documentation of a library/program, or even replicating a paper (and dockerize it!).

Activities carried out during the Brain / Behavior / Society Springschool can result in useful outputs for the scientific community. We highly encourage you to submit a project for this year’s edition. If you are in need of inspiration, have a look at the project ideas we have received so far, or check out the projects submitted to Brainhack Global.

Further sources of information:

Read the excellent “How to Guideline for Leading and Attending to Brainhack Projects” for further recommendations and suggestions. Although this guide was written with a classic Brainhack in mind it is nevertheless a great resource also for this Springschool.

Check out the very serious guide on “Get a hold of your Donuts!” which can save your life during the school 😜

Learn from the advices and suggestions curated from the many previous years’ project leaders and attendees as the best practices of running successful, collaborative projects that would lead high impact and successful outputs in the given short amount of time.