summary_notes

Important summary notes from the morning session:

• What the "bottom-up" approach to a toolkit would look like.

• The experience of others -- both in economics and related fields (eg. so-called agent-based modeling groups with 6-7Mill EUR coding projects)

• Licenses for code - public domain, private-sector friendly, and related

• Lowering costs for policy-oriented researcher participation (eg. CFPB, OFR, IMF, Federal Reserve)

• Setting up incentives for cooperation -- using and contributing back, particularly models which may be useful to the policy community

• Bill discussed the CFPB experience, and general open-source experience, in producing tools and convincing users to uptake and participate.

A common topic which arose repeatedly throughout the day was the need for a few people with a vision -- a working group, for example.

Some important results of the morning: a toolkit would be very welcome. The "bottom-up" approach would be largely an effort to produce an Application Programmers Interface (API), which is easiest to produce simply by creating a number of example models. [Another topic which arose repeatedly: we need examples to push forward.]

The mantra of "if you build it they will come" doesn't apply to open-source development.

Important summary topics in Lunch Session:

• Open-source languages and tools which are ideal for collaboration. Languages Python and Julia discussed. Their "Notebook" framework is a robust and easy way for researchers to interact.
• Good practices for reproducible research.

Important summary topics in Afternoon Session:

• The need to "produce 10 models" with a top-down framework
• The need for researchers to be able to build a model in any framework incrementally, in an exploratory fashion
• The importance of researchers being able to access code directly

Important summary topics in the late afternoon session:

• connections to other organizations: Soc Comp Econ Dynamcis, via Gary
• The importance of being able to direct funding towards researchers who contribute in particular ways
• compiling a wishlist of papers
• incentives for building core models
• importance of concerete commitment from high-quality people. Eg: performance reviews.
• importance of possible independent organization
• the idea of an "e-journal" [end with dynare quote]