An Open Source Platform for Social Science Research

In 2016, a group of social scientists at the University of California, Berkeley received a large grant to develop tools for rigorous social science research, initially focused on collective identity formation. As part of this project, Jazkarta has been helping them develop Dallinger, a tool to automate experiments that use large numbers of subjects recruited on platforms like Mechanical Turk. They chose Jazkarta because of our web application development and agile project management expertise, but also because of our familiarity with large, open source software projects  (such as Plone) - something Dallinger would also like to become. In this presentation, members of the Jazkarta team (David Glick, Alec Mitchell, Matthew Wilkes, and Sally Kleinfeldt) described how we put the lessons of Plone to work helping to set up this new open source project. We also described how the technology stack (Python, Redis, Web Sockets, Heroku, AWS/Mechanical Turk/boto, Flask, PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy, Gunicorn, Pytest, gevent) has been working for us.

Watch a video of the talk on YouTube.

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