ODS breakfast is coming to your city! Paris, and…
By: Ilya Prokin
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Paris, Technology, Data Science

ODS breakfast is coming to your city! Paris, and…

…it depends on you!

This post is a celebration of Parisian Open Data Science (ODS) breakfasts, weakly unofficial gatherings about Data Science and life, held on Saturdays at Malongo Cafe (near Place Saint-Michel).

Thanks for the logo to Yulia Dembitskaya

Open Data Science breakfasts are available not only in Paris, but in many cities across the world. At a Data Science breakfast, you can meet a fellow Data Scientist over coffee to talk about Data Science and anything else.

At a Parisian Data Science Breakfast, you can meet people from both industry and academia. You will find diverse expertise in Data Science and beyond. Collectively, we have knowledge in Mathematics and Physics, Computer Science, Quantitative Finance and Trading, Neuroscience, Spiking Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Optimization, Statistics, Network Science, Recommender Systems, DevOps, Software and Machine Learning Engineering and more.

Read on to find out about all kinds of the brain food that you can get from ODS breakfasts and learn community building lessons.

Where it all began

From Russia with love

Data Science Breakfasts tradition started in Moscow circa 2013. People gathered to grab an early breakfast and to talk about data science and life before work. Data Science Breakfast tradition spread to other cities in Russia and other countries.

Data Science Breakfasts are backed by a strong international community — Open Data Science (ODS). ODS unites all researchers, engineers and developers around Data Science and related areas.

To quote, https://ods.ai/en/, the goals of the community are:

🔥 Create awesome projects, events and educational courses

💪 Share experience, developing each other’s skills

📈 Promote open Data Science and push the field forward

Along with Open Data Science Breakfasts, ODS organizes multiple events across Russia and abroad.

ODS slack is in Russian, but the quality of the content is so good so that many non-Russian-speaking people are reading it with translation. Luckily, there is an English-language Telegram channel https://t.me/opendatascience that aggregates major Data Science news (it is still a fraction of what you can find on slack).

Parisian ODS breakfasts are announced on https://t.me/opendatascience and on ODS slack (http://opendatascience.slack.com/, get an invite at https://ods.ai/en/) in #_meetings_france channel. You can find all kinds of information about Parisian breakfast at https://data-science-breakfast-in-paris.github.io/ and you can propose topics to discuss at the next breakfast https://data-science-breakfast-in-paris.github.io/feedback/.

In Paris: the beginning, the growth, and the future

ODS has been spreading its tentacles internationally and, along the way, converting people all over the world to faithful followers of Data Scientology cult =) Get ready to get converted in Paris.

It has all started when one of the ODS activists was passing by Paris for his vacations and has organized the first breakfast on 5 January 2019 at Malongo Café and announced it on https://t.me/opendatascience.

The first Parisian ODS breakfast

He told me “you should continue organizing it and make it a tradition”. I am happy that I said “sure” as breakfasts attracted a lot of bright and interesting people.

There were highs and lows, but overall breakfasts became a success. There were episodes of low attendance and silence, but the breakfasts have been accelerating. This statement is too qualitative for the post that has Data in its title. Of course, you want something more quantitative. And now… what you’ve been waiting for… her majesty… Data. There are 90 people in Telegram group most of whom have attended at least one breakfast and the number is growing:

Breakfast is growing. The sky is the limit?

Why the DS breakfast community growth was so steady?

Community. It is backed by very strong international community and is announced through its powerful channels. A great format for a meetup, it is empirically proven that people across the world find DS breakfast a great format. Persistence. I learned the importance of persistence. After the first breakfast that was attended by 8 people, I have organized the second one and it was just me and Johannes Thiele. What a low point! However, it was just a start; we just moved on and it paid off. We had a period of low activity during my vacations at the end of March — the first weeks of April, but we have reemerged stronger. We had not only breakfasts, but we saw each other at other meetups and had two Afterworks. If you come to breakfasts now, it is extremely unlikely that you see just two people. Most likely, we will be around 7 (Check out the whole distribution below). Activate a hub in a social network, and the activated hub will bring new community members. Guess who should we thank the most? Right, it is the founding father, Kirill who has added the most people to Telegram group (see below). I am finishing the second in this race and the third place goes to Liubov Tupikina. Liubov has contributed a lot to community building. She is a researcher and a hub in social networks. It is a funny coincidence that she happens to have published scientific papers on Network Science.

Distribution of the number of people

We should thank them for community development

Below, you can see who you can expect to see at Parisian Data Breakfast.

Demographics that is going to evolve

You are very likely to see Russians, but almost always we have non-Russian speaking people (at least one), and all of us speak English so that everyone is included. We can improve by attracting more women and non-Russian speakers and you can help here by joining us =)

Although Russian speakers are around 80% (see the figure below), we stick to English, and, in total, breakfast attendants speak at least 11 languages: Russian, English, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Latvian, Portuguese, Finnish, Kyrgyz, Arabic (forgive me if I forgot something, I surely did).

We still have some work to do on diversity. If you don’t speak Russian, please come

ODS is proud of its origin, but we have large international ambitions and we want to attract more non-Russian speaking people.

We want you to join us!

For a technical community, we are not doing badly in terms of gender equality (around 20% women) and I suspect that some of our women participants are plotting to infiltrate Paris Women in ML meetup and convert some ladies to Data Scientology.

Gender balance that is going to evolve

Initially, we were not very good at remembering to take group photo, but over time we have improved our photo-discipline, and finally developed a stable photo taking habit.

Do you see this nice looking coffee on the bottom-right? It tastes very good as well.

Keep it up guys! Let’s attract new bright people to our Data Scientology cult :)

Where it is all going

The future of the breakfast is bright and it depends on the collective will of the community (on you!).

Some time ago, I did a questionnaire to understand people’s wants. Here are the results:

I am thankful to all of you who proposed ideas either by filling the questionnaire or in private discussions. Here is the synthesis:

Prepared during the week, optional list of no more than 3 DS related topics to discuss: news, papers, problems that some of us face (make an easy way for people to propose topics during the week so that people can vote and think about it before breakfasts). Done.

Structure the info about the community, intra-community services

DS events: talks, hackathons, etc

Try once to substitute Saturday breakfast for an evening event (beers?)

Career development related activities: interview problems, mock-interviews, etc

The future is bright, come join us at Malongo Cafe. See you next Saturday at 10:30.

If you are interested in setting up weekly ODS Breakfasts in your city, contact us at: https://t.me/malev