Introduction: @matherion

Gjalt-Jorn Peters, He/Him, @matherion

The Netherlands , Maastricht, in the south

I’m a psychologist working at the Open University of the Netherlands. I obviously hasve affinity with ICT My main research interests are behavior change, night life-related risk behaviors, and I do a lot of methodology stuff (e.g. developing in R )

Like @jeanphi.baconnais, from whom I shamelessly stole his intro structure , I use GitLab every day at work (both for research and for teaching) and for my personal projects (which, admittedly, are actually also all work-related

I do have a question which I’ll post in the appropriate place, after having been directed here by @dnsmichi (thanks!).

Didn’t know this forum existed - and can’t promise to be here a lot (so many social media!), but I’m quite active on Twitter (https://twitter.com/matherion).

@matherion Psychology – awesome! I studied psychology during my undergraduate career in university (but only as a minor, not a major), and my sister is now a PsyD, so I have a special place in my heart for psychologists I would love to get more psychologists involved in open source software, for example, but that’s another topic…

Do you have any links to your work or recommended articles about behavior change or night-life related risk behaviors that you think we should read? Or any videos related to your interests?

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of behavior change is Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk “Your body language may shape who you are.” Where your body language can change your behavior by making you more or less confident. It’s a great, short video for people who haven’t already seen it!

Thanks for your reply @nuritzi! I would also love to get more psychologists involved in FLOSS The Open Science movement that it currently active already helps a bit with that. One of the components is to make science more transparent and accessible - and you can’t get more transparent and accesible than open source software

Well. I do have stuff on behavior change, if you’re interested, but it’s usually considerably less entertaining and accessible than TED talks One thing is an Open Access book I’m writing with a friend – and hosting right here in GitLab pages! – called the Book of Behavior Change (https://bookofbehaviorchange.com). But we’re still working on it, so very ‘drafty’ for now! Other resources are https://effectivebehaviorchange.com, where I collected links to a series of Open Access articles with practical tips/guidelines. If you have a specific use case, we can always chat about that. Since humans are kind of complicated, and behave in complicated, extensive environments, behavior change can quickly become overwhelming, so having concrete examples helps

Regarding night-life related risks, it really depends on your interests. I’m involved in a think tank where we conduct a Multi Criteria Decision Analysis to compare different policies for MDMA, the drug (for which we’re using one of the few GitLab repos I set to private). That’s not out yet, but that’s a lot of fun and interesting, I think. So I’ll happily point you in that direction once we decided to go public (we were planning an event for that, but then Corona happened )

Anyway Thank you for your interest!

You seem involved in super-interesting projects, too! Didn’t know about the GitLab for Open Source project, or CHAOSS. CHAOSS looks fascinating - something I could (probably, should ) learn a lot about! So thank you for the (effortless, but still ) link!!!

@matherion Thanks for the links! I just downloaded a copy of your book so that I can take a look during my upcoming PTO! I’ll also check out the website you linked to. I can already tell I’m going to have a lot of fun diving into this topic!

Yeah… Corona changed a lot of plans I hope you’re able to do the event soon, perhaps online? If you’re ever interested in tools reviews for online conferences there’s this resource we’re putting together with conference tools reviews (it just have a few for now). We’re adding a review on Big Blue Button and Rocketchat soon since GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference was hosted recently using those two tools. It went pretty well and all of the tools used were entirely FOSS!

Yay! If you’re interested in CHAOSS the best way to learn more / get started is to join one of the monthly Community Calls, which happen on the first Tuesday of the month. If it’d be helpful, I’d also be happy to introduce you to some of the members – so just let me know if you’d prefer that route if/when you decide to check it out! It’s really a great group and has a lot of academics, so you’d fit right in!

I’m actually not super familiar with the Open Science movement, but it’s definitely a great way to get more people into FOSS. There’s someone who joined GNOME who is a PhD student in Neuroscience and uses FOSS in his daily work in academia. He’s already made a big impact on the GNOME community with the open science perspective that he brings and he gave a great talk about some of the challenges around getting more academics to use FOSS: “Research Science and Libre Computing: A Scientist’s Perspective”. (Unfortunately the video quality of the talk isn’t great)

Anyway, lots to talk about, and so glad you’re part of our community! I look forward to reading your book next week and also look forward to seeing you around the forum! If you have ideas for us re: the GitLab forum experience, please let us know. We’re testing out ways for how to make it a place where people can make great connections like this one! I wonder if any of the behavioral change methodology you’re knowledgeable in could map over to our forum design / experience

If you have ideas for us re: GitLab and universities, we also have a GitLab for Education program that @chupy runs. I know she’s hoping to expand the program and make it more robust, and we’re excited about where that will lead!

Wow, lots to talk about indeed!

Yeah, we will resort to online probably… Thanks for the links!!! I haven’t used Big Blue Button yet - only Jitsi, which I try to use whenever possible instead of Zoom etc. RocketChat - that’s similar to Slack, Element (apparently the new name of Riot.IM?), and MatterMost, right? Or is it something else?

A big problem I keep running into in academia is that support staff (i.e. the local ICT department) is often quite enamored by proporietary software, and it costs a lot of energy to push FLOSS all the time. And I’m not good enough with linux to set everything up on my own server. So also for this ‘think train launch thingy’ I guess we’ll have to resort to whatever tech the involved organisations already have

I’ll (probably ) get back to you re: CHAOSS, thank you!!!

Thanks also for the link to the “Research Science and Libre Computing: A Scientist’s Perspective” talk, it looks great!

Don’t get your hopes up re: the book; we basically only finished two chapters in a first draft version because we needed them as materials for a workshop If you want an intro in behavior change, A practical guide to effective behavior change: How to identify what to change in the first place and A practical guide to effective behavior change: How to apply theory- and evidence-based behavior change methods in an intervention are maybe better Open Access starting places.

GitLab for Education also sounds great! I might get back to that at some point as well. Or not - most of these things I kind of do in between, and there are so many more things than there is time

Thank you for all the information, links, and enthusiasm!

Welcome, @matherion! We are happy to see you here are on the forum! Feel free to reach out with any questions on the GitLab for Education Program over in our forum Education category

Great, thank you @chupy!

Thanks for the heads-up about the book chapters