Carpentry Clippings, 12 September 2017
Highlights from the Software and Data Carpentry Community Calendar
Community News
New Staffer
We are delighted to announce that SherAaron Hurt has accepted the job of workshop administrator with the Carpentries. SherAaron is joining our team of workshop coordinators who manage workshop logistics, communicate with hosts and instructors, and respond to general workshop inquiries. Read more.
Software and Data Carpentry Merger
With the merger of Software and Data Carpentry now formally agreed, the work of achieving this integration has begun. Community input will be key, so we will be requesting feedback from you over the coming months on everything from governance to lesson development.
CarpentryCon Venue Bids
After our call for venues for CarpentryCon 2018, we received some promising bids to host this new event. There is still time to put in your own bid form (we would like to finalise this by October), and to provide more input about what kind of event you want CarpentryCon to be. You can view and comment on the proposed draft schedule and the themes the event will address. A summary of the most recent community calls can be found here.
Instructor Training Lessons Released
After finalising a joint revision project, we have now released the latest version of our instructor training curriculum. Thanks to all the Trainers and Instructors who got involved, adding new material, fixing bugs, rewording material, and reorganizing sections.
Subcommittee Activity
New Trainers
With the latest cohort of Trainers completing their training, we now have 40 certified Trainers. The current cohort are from all over - the US, Greece, Thailand, Canada, South Africa, the UK, and the Netherlands - so this will be a great boost for community-building in those countries. It will also help us with instructor checkout. With more Trainers on board, we are now able to offer three teaching demo slots per week instead of two. We will continue to offer these sessions on the same days as before, then, starting in November, we will add an additional timeslot midway between the other two sessions. Sign up here for a session.
Maintaining Our Lessons
Joinery
Jonah Duckles is running a series of webinars to help people make the case for joining Software and Data Carpentry at their institution. Sign up for a slot. If you are ready to go ahead now, use this form to get the conversation started.
New Form to Upload Blog Posts
To make it easier for people to submit blog posts to Software and Data Carpentry, we have created a new upload form. Just paste in your text, upload your images, if any, add your contact details and leave the rest to us. You will have a chance to review the post before we publish it.
What you may have missed on the blog and mailing lists
African Workshops
Anelda van der Walt has recently posted reports from workshops in Ethiopia, Mauritius and Namibia. The Data Carpentry workshop in Addis Ababa was a first for Ethiopia. Instructor Lactatia Motsoku said: “I was encouraged by the enthusiasm of the students and their ability to absorb the vast amount of information we shared with them.”
The Mauritius workshop was a Software Carpentry workshop for HPC users. The event was part-sponsored by the HPC Ecosystems Project of the South African Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) which distributes decommissioned HPC equipment to be used at various sites across Africa. Training is crucial to HPC uptake, so the workshop provided a great start for people new to this.
The Namibian Software Carpentry workshop was the second for the country, but the first to be taught solely by local instructors (Jessica Upani and Gabriel Nhinda). One outcome of the workshop was the establishment of a local study group to discuss Python, UNIX, and other topics related to applying computing to research.
Making Programming Accessible
Finding resources for a programmer with limited use of his hands was a thread on the Discuss list this month. Respondents came up with some inspiring resources. We also had a great post recently on how Carpentries workshops can best help people with dyslexia.
Papers & manuscripts from the community
Other places to connect
If you can't get enough Software and Data Carpentry, here are some other places to connect with our community.
Have something you’d like to have included in our next newsletter? Please send items to newsletter@software-carpentry.org
|
