Workshop: Some Underlying Themes

I wanted to revisit some of our "unspoken" themes: we're essentially hoping to convince researchers to join an effort to make some standard toolsets, openly developed and available to all, which can solve economic problems (specifically of the heterogeneous-agent type) with non-bespoke / non-idiosyncratic code.

Papers are peer-reviewed, but code is not (necessarily). This is increasingly important as code drives more developing research. We think a collaboratively developed toolset for heterogeneous-agent models is a perfect "example by application" to illustrate what solutions to this broader issue might look like. A heterogeneous-agent toolkit is our focusing mechanism, but broader collaborative development of public toolsets is our overarching target.

There are a lot of structures needed to support an effort like this; we'll need to think carefully about these details. For example: what incentives might encourage collaboration? What infrastructure might lower costs of collaboration? [eg. github and static pages; IPython/IJulia notebooks] What support might be needed for these efforts from existing organizations, or what new organizations (even if simple "clearing houses") might be needed?

The purpose of the workshop, then, is threefold: (0) present the issue above, and collaborative development of some specific toolsets applied to specific problems as one good answer, (1) reach out to other researchers interested in the same thing and swap experience and motivations, and (2) ask some "meta" questions of "what sorts of additional questions should we be asking?" for this topic, with an eye towards another larger conference on the same topic a year from now.

And of course, in the spirit of the themes above, please add to this/edit this with any of your own motivation!