Early in 2025 we received several requests at Steno Aarhus from colleagues and collaborators to run a workshop on how to use GitHub for managing and working with files. Steno Aarhus has been making increasing efforts to integrate use of GitHub into the organisation overall and into individual research projects. But many researchers and staff are still unfamiliar with how to use GitHub effectively. So in early 2025, we started developing a gentle introductory workshop to using GitHub.
We finished developing the material and ran the workshop on May 26th, 2025 in-person at Steno Aarhus for staff and researchers. We had 24 participants attend the workshop, which were more people than we anticipated! The workshop was very well received, with very positive feedback from participants (see below for some plots of the feedback).
We are collaborating with the DP-Next project to develop and build up their data infrastructure, collection processes, and storage capacity. But we’re also aiming to build up the technical expertise of people in the group. So when DP-Next officially started in September 2025, we planned to run the workshop for the DP-Next people as well. This is partly the aim of Seedcase as well as Work Package 1 of DP-Next.
Since they are spread across all the Steno centers in Denmark, Faroe Islands, and Greenland, we ran the workshop online. This was the first time we’ve ever ran a workshop online, so we had to investigate different options and ways for doing this effectively. We ended up using Gather to virtually host the workshop.
On September 9th, 2025, we ran the workshop online for the DP-Next people. We had 11 participants, who were a mix of PhD students and postdocs from each of the Steno centers. As with the in-person workshop, participants gave very positive feedback and they also enjoyed the online platform.
Participant demographics
The figure below shows some basic demographics about the participants of the two workshops. The first workshop most participants used she/her pronouns with diverse formal positions. In the second workshop, the pronoun distribution of she/her and he/him were more even with almost half of the participants being PhD students. No participants preferred other pronouns to she/her and he/him.
Quantitative feedback
While we collect anonymous qualitative feedback via free-form text in the surveys from participants after each workshop, we also collect quantitative feedback. We have a series of statements that participants respond to on a Likert-scale, from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”. The two plots below show the quantitative feedback from participants of both the in-person and online workshops. Overall, the feedback was very positive, with the vast majority of participants agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statements provided.
Next steps
We will probably run this workshop again next year, but we also want to develop and run a workshop on how to collaborate effectively as a team using GitHub, which we’ve already started working on. We’re quite excited about that one as we think a lot of people could benefit from learning more effective practices at collaborating and developing something together. We hope to run that workshop in mid-2026 🎉